Wild air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS,
“The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe”
BLACK CAMELLIA
[AFTER PETRARCH]
Little room, with four and a half tatami mats
and sliding paper doors, that used to be
a white, translucent place to live in refined poverty,
what are you now but scalding water in a bath?
Little mattress, that used to fold around me
at sunrise as unfinished dreams were fading,
what are you now but a blood-red palanquin
of plucked feathers and silk airing in the sun?
Weeding the garden, paring a turnip, drinking tea
for want of wine, I flee from my secret love
and from my mind’s worm—This is a poem.
Is this a table? No, this is a poem. Am I a girl?—
seeking out the meat-hook crowd I once loathed,
I’m so afraid to find myself alone.
LANDSCAPE WITH DEER AND FIGURE
If you listen, you can hear them chewing
before you see them standing or sitting—
with slim legs and branching antlers—
eating together like children, or the souls
of children, no one animal his own,
as I am my own, watching them watch me,
feeling a fever mount in my forehead,
where all that I am is borne and is effaced
by a herd of deer gathered in the meadow—
like brown ink splashed on rice paper—
abstract, exalted, revealing the eternal harmony,
for only five or six moments, of obligation to family
manifested with such frightful clarity and beauty
it quells the blur of human feeling.
GREEN SHADE
[NARA DEER PARK]
With my head on his spotted back
and his head on the grass—a little bored
with the quiet motion of life
and a cluster of mosquitoes making
hot black dunes in the air—we slept
with the smell of his fur engulfing us.
It was as if my dominant functions were gazing
and dreaming in a field of semiwild deer.
It was as if I could dream what I wanted,
and what I wanted was to long for nothing—
no facts, no reasons—never to say again,
“I want to be like him,” and to lie instead
in the hollow deep grass—without esteem or riches—
gazing into the big, lacquer black eyes of a deer.
KYUSHU HYDRANGEA
Some might say there are too many
for a charity hospital, too many pale
pink blossoms opening into creamy
paler ones, just when everything else
is dying in the garden. They can’t see
the huge, upright panicles correspond
to something else, something not external at all,
but its complement, that atmosphere of pure
unambiguous light burning inwardly,
not in self-regard but in self-forgetting;
they can’t see the lush rainy-season flowers,
with feet planted partially in rock,
lifting their big solemn heads over
the verdant wounded hands of the leaves.
CROWS IN EVENING GLOW
The terrible glorious crows are convening again,
swooping into the area with triumphant caws,
plunging with demon black wings from utility poles,
kicking and pecking a neighbor’s kittens.
Wearing the plaid shirt that was my father’s plaid shirt,
I throw a tarp over a pile of clear pink
hemorrhaging garbage bags. See a crow,
take three steps back. Three crows cried,
someone has died. Go home, Crows! I holler,
My black-lipped daddy is gone. Poor crows,
perplexing as men, nobody is listening
to their tired signals, not even the mother,
with blue drooping breast, nursing a newborn
under a red maple with a nest.
NECESSARY AND IMPOSSIBLE
It is a nation born in the quiet part of the mind,
that has no fantasy of omnipotence,
no God but nature, no net of one vow,
no dark corner of the poor, no fugue-work of hate,
no hierarchies of strength, knowledge or love,
no ash-heap of concrete, gypsum and glass,
no false mercy or truths buried in excrement;
and in this nation of men and women,
no face in the mirror reflecting more darkness
than light, more strife than love, no more strife
than in my hands now, as I sit on a rock,
tearing up bread for red and white carp
pushing out of their element into mine.
CLEANING THE ELEPHANT
Thirsty and pale, her face lowered in concentration,
she doesn’t seem to mind my sweeping
insects and dung from her corrugated flesh,
permitting me even to brush her soft hairy nape,
where I dream of squatting barefoot one day,
like a figure in a scroll, to feel the immutable
place of thought, if an elephant has thought.
“What is the smell of being human?” I want to ask,
like Plato, desiring to witness the truth
as both elephant and embodiment,
pushing out everything else—as when a soul,
finding its peculiar other, pushes out
the staple of life, which is suffering,
and a red sun wraps everything in gold.
MORNING GLORY
Out my window, in a garden the size of an urn,
a morning glory is climbing toward me.
It is five a.m. on the ninth day of the seventh month.
Lying on my soft mats, like a long white rabbit,
I can feel the purifying flames of summer
denuding the landscape, not of birds and animals,
but of blame and illusion. I can hear the white
splashing rivers of forgetfulness and oblivion
soaking me all at once, like loving a man
without wanting him, or a baby emerging
under white light out of its mother,
not the artificial light of the hospital corridor
but of joy growing wild in the garden, its pallid blue
trumpets piercing a brocade of red leaves.
MYSELF WITH CATS
Hanging out the wash, I visit the cats.
“I don’t belong to nobody,” Yang insists vulgarly.
“Yang,” I reply, “you don’t know nothing.”
Yin, an orange tabby, agrees
but puts kindness ahead of rigid truth.
I admire her but wish she wouldn’t idolize
the one who bullies her. I once did that.
Her silence speaks needles when Yang thrusts
his ugly tortoiseshell body against hers,
sprawled in my cosmos. “Really, I don’t mind,”
she purrs—her eyes horizontal, her mouth
an Ionian smile, her legs crossed nobly
in front of her, a model of cat Nirvana—
“withholding his affection, he made me stronger.”
PILLOWCASE WITH PRAYING MANTIS
I found a praying mantis on my pillow.
“What are you praying for?” I asked. “Can you pray
for my father’s soul, grasping after Mother?”
Swaying back and forth, mimicking the color
of my sheets, raising her head like a dragon’s,
she seemed to view me with deep f
eeling, as if I were
St. Sebastian bound to a Corinthian column
instead of just Henri lying around reading.
I envied her crisp linearity, as she galloped
slow motion onto my chest, but then she started
mimicking me, lifting her arms in an attitude
of a scholar thinking or romantic suffering.
“Stop!” I sighed, and she did, flying in a wide arc,
like a tiny god-horse hunting for her throne room.
MELON AND INSECTS
Pedaling home at twilight, I collided
with a red dragonfly, whose tiny boneless
body was thrown into my bicycle-basket.
In my bed, in a pocket notebook, I made
a drawing, then cried, “Wake up, Dragonfly.
Don’t die!” I was sitting half-naked
in the humidity, my pen in my hot palm.
I was smiling at Dragonfly, but getting angry.
So I put him in a rice bowl, with some melon
and swept-up corpses of mosquitoes,
where he shone like a big broken earring,
his terrified eyes gleaming like little suns,
making me exhausted, lonely like that,
before sleep, waiting to show my drawing.
INSOMNIA
At night by lamplight certain insects,
floating or flying, in black or red or gold,
emerge like actors, vaguely apparitional,
in the ordinary space of my room.
Last night, they did The Tempest in a frenzy,
demanding I play Prospero and forgive
everyone. “What is this!” I moaned.
Dear unnatural Ariel, I loved him,
the island setting, the auspicious revenge—
how could I resist? The rain came down,
filling up time like sand or human understanding.
It was as if I were dreaming or dead.
I forgave my brother; he forgave me.
We huddled together in the dark backward of the night.
ORIGINAL FACE
Some mornings I wake up kicking like a frog.
My thighs ache from going nowhere all night.
I get up—tailless, smooth-skinned, eyes protruding—
and scrub around for my original face.
It is good I am dreaming, I say to myself.
The real characters and events would hurt me.
The real lying, shame and envy would turn
even a pleasure-loving man into a stone.
Instead, my plain human flesh wakes up
and gazes out at real sparrows skimming the luminous
wet rooftops at the base of a mountain.
No splayed breasts, no glaring teeth, appear before me.
Only the ivory hands of morning touching
the real face in the real mirror on my bureau.
MASK
I tied a paper mask onto my face,
my lips almost inside its small red mouth.
Turning my head to the left, to the right,
I looked like someone I once knew, or was,
with straight white teeth and boyish bangs.
My ordinary life had come as far as it would,
like a silver arrow hitting cypress.
Know your place or you’ll rue it, I sighed
to the mirror. To succeed, I’d done things
I hated; to be loved, I’d competed promiscuously:
my essence seemed to boil down to only this.
Then I saw my own hazel irises float up,
like eggs clinging to a water plant,
seamless and clear, in an empty, pondlike face.
III
I hate and I love. And if you ask me how,
I do not know: I only feel it, and I’m torn in two.
GAIUS VALERIUS CATULLUS, #85
tr. Peter Whigham
MY TEA CEREMONY
Oh, you bowls, don’t tell the others I drink
my liquor out of you. I want a feeling of beauty
to surround the plainest facts of my life.
Sitting on my bare heels, making a formal bow,
I want an atmosphere of gentleness to drive
out the squalor of everyday existence
in a little passive house surrounded
by black rocks and gray gravel.
Half-cerebral, half-sensual, I want to hear
the water murmuring in the kettle
and to see the spider, green as jade,
remaining aloof on the wall.
Heart, unquiet thing,
I don’t want to hate anymore. I want love
to trample through my arms again.
SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE RED PRINCESS
When the curtain rises,
I appear in a red kimono, opening a paper umbrella.
Tucking my elbows into my waist,
concealing my hands within my sleeves,
I circle the bare stage with tiny steps,
holding my knees inward,
to create the impression I am small,
because to be beautiful is to be small,
not young. I end in a dance of tears,
placing my hand in a simple gesture
in front of my perfect oval face,
indicating a woman’s grief;
I am, after all, a woman,
and not a man playing a woman.
Even with my mouth painted holly berry red
and my waxed brows drawn higher,
there is nothing grotesque or cruel
about my whitened, made-up face.
“The flower of verisimilitude,” they call me—
with my hair done up in a knot
of silver ornaments and lacquered wood
and with my small melon seed face
filled with carnal love—
though some nights sitting for hours
with my numb legs folded under me,
pretending I have fallen out of love,
I cannot believe I am refining feminine beauty
to a level unsurpassed in life.
Bathing with my lover,
gazing at his firm stomach covered by hair,
pressing my burning face there,
and, later, dashing to freedom in the black pines,
I see that I am veering toward destruction,
instead of the unity of form and feeling;
I see a dimly shining instrument
opening the soft meat of our throats.
Feeding and mating we share with the animals,
but volition is ours alone.
Had I not followed a man to death,
I think I would have died quietly,
as I had lived.
FISH AND WATERGRASS
My heart and my body were separate,
when I got off my bike, soaked with sweat,
and put my face in the river, an ethereal
dark place full of algae and watergrass.
Unable to keep a tight control over
their coal-black bodies in the current,
a cluster of koi groped forward,
with white, translucent, overworked eyes
searching for something, as a man searches
after going a great distance.
Who were you
that even now all of me is in tatters,
aching to touch your face floating in dream,
defining itself, like a large white
flower, by separation from me?
AT THE GRAVE OF ELIZABETH BISHOP
I, detaching myself from the human I, Henri,
without thick eyeglasses or rubberized white skin,
stretched out like a sinewy cat in the brown grass
to see what I felt, wrapping my tail around me,
hiding my eyes.
I slept. I waited. I sucked air,
instead of milk. I listened to pigeons murmuring.
Scratching my ear, I couldn’t tell if
I was male or female.
The bundled energy of my life drifted along
somewhere between pain and pleasure,
until a deerfly launched an attack
and anger, like a florist’s scissors,
pinched the bright chrysanthemum of my brain.
Overhead, the long enfolding branches,
weighted down with Venetian green,
suffused the air with possibility.
I felt like a realist, recovering from style.
Grief and dignity swirled around discreetly,
transferring to me an aura of calm,
as I lay in a shawl of gold light,
licking my paws, licking my throat,
my smooth imperturbable face revealing nothing,
even when I thought about my first loves,
surface and symbol, rubbing against me,
humping in the shadows, making my whole body tremble.
I purred, watching an iridescent blue beetle
imbibe chlorophyll from a leaf.
I flared my nostrils, hearing a starling
splash in an amphora of rainwater.
With my paws in the air, exposing my ripe belly,
I rubbed my spine, a little drunk on the ultraviolet rays
and on myself, I confess.
Then the sky cleared. Birds were flying.
I felt a deep throbbing, as from a distant factory,
binding me to others, a faint battering of wings against glass
that was the heart in the lovely dark behind my breast,
as I was crouching to tie my shoelaces,
feeling strange in the meaty halves of my buttocks,
until I sprinkled a little earth on my head,
like Hadrian reunited with the place he loved.
OLYMPIA
Tired, hungry, hot, I climbed the steep slope
to town, a sultry, watery place, crawling with insects
and birds.
In the semidarkness of the mountain,
small things loomed large: a donkey urinating on a palm;
a salt-and-saliva-stained boy riding on his mother’s back;
a shy roaming black Adam. I was walking on an edge.
The moments fused into one crystalline rock,