說不盡蘑菇 More Than Can Be Told
逐句解 Line by line
More than can be told of mushrooms, wood-ear fungus, tender bamboo shoots and yellow-essence root, ten fragrant plain dishes, a hundred flavours of delicacy.
說不盡 — cannot be finished in the telling — is the storyteller admitting defeat, and it is a formula. 不 reads bú here because 盡 is jìn, a falling tone, and a 不 before a falling tone rises. 黃精, huáng jīng, is a knotted rhizome of the polygonatum family that Daoist adepts ate to lighten the body — a pointed thing to set before the god of longevity.
Coming and going they never once stopped moving, advancing and withdrawing with everything laid on in full.
The poem closes on the waiting staff. Sixteen lines about a table, and the last thing described is the people carrying it in and out, who are never named and never stop.
The formula "more than can be told" is how a performing storyteller gets off a list he could extend indefinitely. It is an honest admission that the catalogue is arbitrary and could go on, and the audience is expected to enjoy the sound of it rather than take an inventory.
Ending on the servants is a small piece of craft. The poem has spent its whole length on objects; its final image is of labour, moving without stopping, so that the objects can be where they are.