Ah Wong’s head floated down a stream, buffeted by the torrents of water, breaking on the rocks, breaking to gales of laughter. We poets beneath our umbrellas along the banks of the winding stream, served by the giggling girls with lotus feet, skilled at rhyming when drunk, boasted and bragged and demanded a contest: the person who found the head must sup a skull’s worth of wine and compose a verse to conjure a world of poetry, a world that a suffering man might make to distract his thoughts.
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