Author’s photo by Costa Athanassiou

There is no name of artist or sculptor who willed the shape,
imagined sun gleaming off stone as he hewed hardness
into awe. The first to pick the stone, delineate lion as if
an immortal sculpting air into existence, must have had vision
of the beasts at dawn, or was it dusk? A shaman, he daydreamed
the stone dream of time, talisman of a stonemason’s wonder, his
creations’ growling masks of pleasure heralds of fanciful imaginings.
Lugou Qiao, whose aqueous sound floats on the air like
the scent of the cooling peach in summer, goes by another name,
a traveller’s name, Marco Polo Bridge, revealing it trades
in possibilities of nomenclatures as if the Book of Changes speaks.

Did a low cloud float across his horizon as Marco Polo
too crossed the bridge? The Yongding River a rushing
torrent in his day, a flow of easy waters in mine, my horizon
is checked by railway bridge in one direction, a highway
in the other, impossible now to guess the ancient landscape.
Wanping Fortress stands behind and forwards are some dwellings,
the undulating stone beneath my feet watery as the moon.
I walk off the bridge, trace the line of the houses, arrive
at the river below to trudge across a causeway, envision
the locals trapped in a shadow play of stone and reverie,
fragile inheritors of those who lived here, the landscape
changing around them like a gossamer web of dreams.

A man on his haunches talks into his mobile phone
as timelines converge into a single dream of stone. I climb
an iron stair to the other side, pause at railway tracks to watch
trains roll by, a freight train like a beast of slithering iron.
Who would have thought it? Trainspotting at Lugou Qiao.
Falling light draws a curtain over the horizon, my theatre
of animated dreams suspended as the bridge returns
to itself, dusk turning all into a stone arc of fading dreams,
a kite soaring over Lugou Qiao like a gigantic bird.

As I walk along the highway, the dust and dirt of Beijing envelop
my body like a river whose flow is carrying me back
into the mouth of a city. Beijing’s distracting possibilities,
as I search for my bus-stop, shimmer on the blackening horizon,
a mirage of towers of glass. The leftover shanties around me,
refuse of a different life, are as real as the stone lions
of Lugou Qiao, and as fragile. On the bus and then the subway,
this hot evening the bridge becomes a fabulist’s tale
of a span of stone lions, a crossing like no other, a promise
of sleeping visions, the bedrock of my stone dreams
of Marco Polo’s travels. Enamoured by sight of lion,
the growing moon legate of my mythmaking, I find
my nighttime equilibrium in the balance of reverie
and dream, a teasing embrace, my thoughts a stream
of drifting narratives, the world at nightfall a darkening
vision of chimerical awakenings. On their plinths,
the stone lions of Lugou Qiao sit gazing like lords, sentinels
of a different time, yet alive with their dreams of stone,
creatures that growl and snap from columns grey with moonlight.

‘Lions at Lugou Qiao’ has previously been published in P76 Issue 8 and Finding My Feet. An Anthology of Poetic Voices (MPU, 2023).

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Tina Giannoukos is a poet, writer, critic, editor, and creative writing teacher. She is the author of two poetry collections, including Bull Days (Arcadia, 2016), which was shortlisted for the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and longlisted for the 2017 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. A former committee member of the Melbourne Poets Union, she served as Workshop Co-ordinator and Editor-in-Chief. In the latter role, she published the Blue Tongue Poets and Red-bellied Poets chapbook series. Tina has taught creative writing at the University of Melbourne and academic writing at the Beijing University of Technology. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne and is a presenter on 3CR Community Radio’s Spoken Word program.

P76 issue 9: Poetries of place/ displacement/ diaspora/ odyssey: On-line Edition. Table of Contents