Read an Excerpt
Nonferrous
NOT NONFERROUS,
all colors mixed to render
the color “gray”.
The river bites into the land and
“geological memories” surface.
Plants with a grayish tint,
Tillandsia, or remnant snow.
Nothing swaying,
nothing wavering,
not a thing too complex to grasp.
Grayish prosaic phenomena,
afloat at the horizon, a cipher, a viper
raises its head.
In what country’s language does the word “subject”
hold two opposite meanings: “subject OF an action,”
and “subject TO an action”?
There’s no such limbo in human memories.
Still, "particles of iron" course through the blood
and all the color drawn from everything
mixes into a “gray”
that from nowhere
stirs up emotions.
The Portrayal of White
Noon came and it was
as though the clouds caught fire.
The sky piling into its zenith,
and now, it might be dispelled in an instant.
On this earth,
wild rumors quietly take off
like brush fires,
and they scorch us like strong alkaline.
It could be you’d prefer to watch the sky
turning into a cobalt conflagration.
And if “a piece of bone” were hung there,
its whiteness would make your eyes ache.
Cupping your own shoulders as you might cup an egg,
you shudder, imagining a loneliness beyond your imagination.
A torn, jagged idea, like a thunderbolt,
sourced in the cloud of our species.
Measuring the depth of the emotion,
“time” fans out like summer grass.
Holding your head, drinking heavily,
holding your knees, curling into a ball,
the human emotions “agony” or “anguish”
are metaphors for “time,”
the shadows folding, the darkness dissolving into the body.
Then, praise for “the bone’s” whiteness
which never quite fades into the surrounding dark.
If we associate blue with “bone-scattering” rituals,
is the whiteness of bone a metaphor for “time”
or a compelling mimicry of what only adheres to the “surface”?
This noon,
even more deeply than on the seventh day,
a small creature sleeps like “ashes”
dreaming of something that never happens,
turning its body.
Cauliflowers, or Cabbage Flowers bloom, though no one observes them.
When clouds are colored with the same pale rose seen on the Japanese ibis’
wings,
“time” holds, filling with that “white” light
in which all colors in the visible spectrum are contained.
A Thousand Vowels
A long slope.
The strong sun dipped, and finally sank.
No matter how long I walked, I stayed in “the middle of the road.”
The name torn into pieces.
Just keeping on, climbing higher and higher,
I’d completely forgotten the name.
The west wind shifts the typhoon’s course,
the world, for a few hours, is thrown into confusion.
You might name one thing after another,
but each loses its name in that same moment.
Into what we call “nature.”
I stood in the middle of nature.
And something was missing, the natural was
draped in a thin shroud.
Vowels scattered,
the name went missing.
When once more the name “nature” was applied
to the desolate-as-ever landscape,
immediately, the name began to weather away.
What is still losing its name,
and what has already lost its name,
those two strands entwine
around the true name.
Those who have wings stay put,
howling out their condition over and over,
“How fragile we are!”
though no one hears them.
Thousands of ripples tell
a story of benthic anguish.
The ripples beach themselves
on the name of each anguish,
vowels scatter by the thousands
over the earth.
The Inertia of Anxiety
The only thing I can talk about may be
the pain,
the sound of the soul shattering into pieces,
and how quietly, or how sluggishly it happens,
that may be the only thing.
The moon wet and silvered.
Being lonely
was such an easy thing.
But I wasn’t even lonely.
Around this time, a huge squid
was circulating in the Chatham Island deeps.
Feeding on plankton, small fish,
and on its solitude, tearing apart larger fish,
putting on size.
It was so lonely in the deep sea
that the squid became less and less transparent
as ammonia collected in its system,
that and loneliness.
By now, I recognize
the word, the term that is so close to me.
“Being lonely” was imaginable enough,
though calling it “despair”
simplifies it too much.
I was fighting against this simplification.
Whispering, softly, this term,
the implication of loneliness and despair
automatically begins,
and the story automatically
completes itself.
In this critical age, the year of crisis,
I slept without dreaming;
instead, I tried to live my dreams.
I wasn’t even lonely.
Beyond such matters,
the true plateau stretched out.
Rejected by Water
At dusk.
The subtle vibrations only your breath registers.
Seeking such vibrations
for these last decades,
you come to know, from the soles of your feet upward, how much moisture
the soil of each place holds.
But why are riverbanks so dry?
Being rejected by water,
being rejected by the river,
you idle away your life,
and in the blink of an eye,
you’ve already arrived into your late years.
Thinking that you’re remaining in place,
and reflecting on yourself
in your own native land,
you stay removed from your own origin.
In such moments,
the emotion you associate with “my native country”
is born without a referent.
In such moments,
people like to see headwaters.
Every time some casual conversation takes place,
your existence is jeopardized,
you won’t be able, from time to time, to hear your own voices.
When you cross a river,
everyday scenery blurs out,
though sometimes, you manage to see
yourself.
People believe the source of the river is the omphalos of the world.
Legend has it,
that there is a column at the center of Eurasia
rising into the azure sky, supported by a huge fish.
That summit, at an altitude of 6.656 meters, endures frost year-round,
and on the mountain’s skirt, the holy Lake Manasarowar
is surrounded by an ethereal atmosphere
reflecting the will of the gods.
The shape of the holy mountain Kailas is limned with ice.
Beside it, a lion spouts water night and day,
birthing the four great distinct muddy rivers.
Let’s name them:
the Indus, the Ganges, the Sutlej, the Yarlung Zangbo.
In 1907,
Sven Hedin visited the source of these rivers
after his deadly journey to the highland of Qiangtang.
“One old pilgrim lay dead
between two rocks.
This man didn’t have enough stamina
to accomplish his pilgrimage through these godly mountains.”1)
Is his soul now drifting over or under what he believed
was the sea of reincarnation?
The bones laid out at the foot of the Kailas,
and left for “sky-burial” look
like shards of ice strewn across the holy mountain,
and a young girl can lose her life and be washed away
even from the mouth of a river.
1) quoted from A Conquest of Tibet by Sven Hedin.
Wandering Birds
A thousand countries in myself—
There’s something that precipitates to the very bottom of such a feeling.
Is everything just an image,
or is this only a wasteland where images overflow,
and become a language?
There is a sound you can hear
only when your body grows older and more tranquil.
And yet, can it be called “a sound”?
It’s more a smell
than a sound.
People die,
just as the dead die,
and then, those who died twice
die three times,
and they seem to fill “afterdeath.”
As such, in regions where water is abundant,
human life and death aren’t separated out.
Odor of snow.
In the margin, going paler and paler,
where not even one line has been written,
an empty sky has already collapsed.
(After that, 500 years pass)
And in the second line, not yet written,
a water rail begins to chirp.
From where the chirp merges with the sky
(another 300 hundred years pass)
a river begins,
offering the gods an entrance,
as if remaining in place,
you stop where you are,
reflecting on yourself,
dancing,
going mad.
And the gods are already gone.
The breast-like mountains
sink below the misty, gloomy air.
The mountains are so low,
clouds, like a dog’s tongue, lap at them.
The skies are so low,
the river gets much colder.
Sticking your hand into the flow
you cleave the stream into two
currents that come clear as life and death.
Around here,
when you ask the name of a tree,
what you’ll hear is “It’s a tree.”
Yes, that’s a tree.
Yes, that’s a mountain.
Yes, and this is water.
“Here in this place,
there are more badgers and foxes than people.
You may see a human
who is not human
who is some hirsute creature
disguised,
and if you see some part of its body
is transparent,
you’ll know for sure it was once human.”
Well, is that a human?
It may be I miss the living.
The thousand countries within me—
appearing from nowhere,
and uttering nothing: this is my father.
Sitting upright with her legs folded
and smiling unselfconsciously,
my mother.
Every night, the illusion passes,
leaving a sliver of pain;
wandering birds chirp sadly,
not given to fly anywhere else.
The birdsong carries up to the clouds,
tomorrow it will snow.
