June 28, 1997
My previous statements were made in haste. I was hungry and confused, and I longed for purpose. I wanted to seem like I was in the process of focusing in on something important. I wanted to feel purpose rising like an ancient city from the excavator’s pick and shovel. I wanted this so much that I rushed – I swung my pick wildly, and I brought a great delicate city to the dust it had always verged on.
Joe Wenderoth (2000)
The Most Sensual Room
One wall of the bathroom of Jay’s apartment has a cat’s footprints. Absence is something like that. To leave evidence. I see it. By rolling the world back. The way the cat ran up the wall and escaped out of the window. The wind that came in just as the cat left knocked down everything it touched by reversing time, from the small past in which the cat had disappeared, toward the present. The wind, having substantially disturbed the proper position of a light letter on the desk, has now passed by. And it is no longer here. Jay and I are contained in the room. And yet, the room feels vacant, somehow. Am I here? Clearly exist here? I am passing through it. I will become absent.
From the open window I hear the sounds of the neighbour’s house. Why aren’t you finishing your homework? The noise of plates. Would you come here and help me a bit? The noise of plates. What did you do with that? The noise of a washing machine. The soft ringing of a telephone. Hello, hello? Hello, hello? The beep signalling that the washing machine finished its work. We don’t know the faces of our neighbours. Nonetheless, they come in. Like a flood. Our neighbours’ daily routines, into this vacant room.
Jay and I turn on music. A brief conversation. Sexual intercourse. Laughter. The sound of slapping flesh. Two people cursing each other. These noises, too, slowly go out. Toward our neighbour’s house. Unobtrusively, directly. We languidly blend with one another, with voices alone. On the ground separating us ivy leaves overgrow.
The Sunday morning when I leave Jay’s room. There is Jay’s room where I no longer am. I don’t leave a single footprint, but my invisible fingerprints are imprinted everywhere. Nights, I think of the room. I peer out of the window. I see the absences of myself and the cat. Jay is a man who is part of that room. His long body tightly coiled into hardness, he, the penis of the room, is quietly asleep. I stretch my hand and touch the room. The wall is soft. I push the room harder, and the room goes out of the room. The room that contains nothing, except Jay, at first with some bounce, like a soap bubble, goes out of the hard room, slowly.
Masayo Koike (2000), translated from the Japanese by Hiroaki Sato
THE POSTMODERN PROSE POEM
* * *
The Cough
He felt an uncomfortable sensation in his throat. Perhaps his throat was struggling with words. Seated in the car next to this Japanese film director, Wilhelm began to cough. He feared the conflict going on in his throat might not stop. It might continue and interrupt their conversation in the long drive from the Japanese airport. He threw his body against the seat in an attempt to shake off his embarrassment.
‘Allergy,’ said Nagao with confidence, ‘Allergy to our film.’ On Nagao’s unwrinkled skin were little ribbons of smile.
At the intersection of the road in Nagasaki where in Japanese films a short dark woman usually squats, Wilhelm pointed out a break between two buildings where light crept through like an oyster. He said he would like to use that oyster light. ‘Cliche,’ said Nagao.
(Observing Nagao in his dark blue denims, he wondered if their film should be called Dark Blue Denim.) He wished the noise an oyster makes could get into the film. Nagao shook his head. ‘Better noise the eye when it blinks. “Pachi Pachi” in Japanese.’
Wilhelm suggested the sound of creaking wood for the scene of the two people lost in the garden.
‘Pachi Pachi better,’ Nagao said. ‘More subtle.’
The action was too slow and Wilhelm wanted a more violent crescendo. When the body fell down the cellar stairs, perhaps another body could fall on top of it?
‘Could be liquid soap on stair,’ said Nagao.
In the middle of a film, Wilhelm always had the feeling he was being chased. He complained that when he directed those shots up in the sky with two planes flying parallel to each other, he was also in a sky chase. ‘Flower petals putting on the wings of a plane,’ suggested Nagao.
Perhaps he might return to his home for awhile and the scenarist could work with Nagao. She could put her own story into the script, how she got hired, etc. Was there something going on between her and Nagao.
He thought of home as a possible sequence and Home started to roll with its camera views. Home needed editing, especially the scene with his analyst when they discussed his cough that now seemed like another room in the movie.
Nagao believed the film was too slow. It was old-fashioned to explain why gangsters upset the fish cart.
Wilhelm disagreed and told him the fish cart was like a scene by the painter, Utamoro, a capsule of real life. He suggested a new title, Dreams of Real Life.
‘No,’ said Nagao, both eyes blinking, The Cough is better.
Barbara Guest (1999)
Cinema-Going
One afternoon in a cinema in the East Neuk when I was about nine years old. The film was Captains Courageous with Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew, the child star. A story of the famous schooners out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, to fish the Grand Banks for cod. Astonishingly, the film projector, concealed in its flimsy little wooden cabin, was powered by the engine of an inshore fishing boat. It put-putted all through the ‘picture’ (as we called a film in those days): put-put in the grey fog of the banks, and put-put in the half-darkness of the summer afternoon stalls.
Ian Hamilton Finlay (1998)
from Joan of Arc
– Here’s Joan drawing herself up forever tall against the sky with a stake at her back.
– Each vertebra presses against the trunk as if to enter it.
– The wind does not ruffle her dress, because of the ropes.
Of the kind of tree that shores her (oak? beech? alder? willow?), we know nothing, because it burned with her.
– Her final expression, hard to read on a face in flames: either dolorous, or joyous, or dolorous and joyous.
Can we see blood running down the burning body?
– A contemporary questions whether someone could pleasure and suffer at the same time, whether puissance and sufferance alternate, one rising as the other recedes.
The crowd forms a cresting sea before her. She can clearly see a little towhead.
In the center of the confusion, she is both calm and deaf (no cry filters through those wide open mouths).
– A course patiently pursued – from Domrémy to Auxerre, Gien to Bourges, Sens to Paris, Reims to Soissons, Arras to Rouen – starts its final progress, from feet to ankles, knees to soft thighs, nipple to neck’s nape, vibrant chin to trembling nostrils (then from her mouth soars the dove).
– Lunula or patella, nothing’s discreet anymore, this is a young (vain?) and compact body burning up, joyous blaze, mystic barbecue.
– Her spasmodic breathing is stopped by the coughing.
– And her eyes turn in their orbits.
Nathalie Quintane (1998), translated from the French by Sylvain Gallais and Cynthia Hogue
Neglected Knives
The knives in the kitchens of single women who order a lot of takeaway sorely need whetting. The knives in the knife block are of no use to the bread crust or the proud tomatoes or the patient onion of the woman who unwittingly brings unprepared food into the kitchen of a woman who stops cooking when her lovers disappear.
Their impossible knives, completely impossible knives, neglected and dusty, in burdensome kitchens that only get plugged in if he who can return the proteins back into the abdomen of the kitchen’s owner is nearby.
Still, the gardens display their finest. The lemons on the trees await hands that will squeeze them over the old asparagus. And the redcurrants sp
read over everything like inebriated lanterns, though that reminds me mostly of the kisses we didn’t repeat.
And still it is also magnificent to slice vegetables into the stomach of one’s love with a sharp knife slice and slice vegetables and again vegetables with a sharp knife into the stomach of one’s love slice and slice the vegetables down with a sharp knife. Into the stomach of one’s love.
Lovely unloved women, you who open the door to young delivery boys bearing lukewarm, fertile, plastic tubs of food, some in uniform, some in their own clothes but all with the waking young eyes that touch anything in their path, whet the knives in your kitchens, whet them.
Kristín Ómarsdóttir (1998), translated from the Icelandic by Vala Thorodds
Little Corona
i.m. Radka Toneff
C: … true, but there is, however, often a real event which triggers what Jabès called our endocrine fantasies. For example, there was boy in our village, Goran … I don’t recall his last name, but his family were from way up on the Ukraine border … who played peckhorn or euphonium with the local marching band, and had the most extraordinary skill: he was able to get a tune out of almost anything, and could make a whistle from piece of macaroni, a zither from a cigarette-packet … Once, I remember, he had us all spellbound as he blew the guts from a goose-egg and then fashioned a kind of primitive ocarina, and on this absurdly delicate instrument blew a strange little off-key melody, almost more breath than note … I hear it clearly in the lochrian mode of so many of the folk-songs of the region, but this is too convenient to be more than a trick of memory … Then this scrawny Orpheus, as soon as he knew we were all drawn into his magic, crushed it in his hand, as if out of pure scorn for us; this trick would always draw an involuntary groan from his audience, and the first time I witnessed it I burst into tears … the sudden, immaculate, irrevocable disappearance of both the singer and the song seemed such a terrifying thing … I can still see his terrible grin …
from Armonie Pierduta şi Regăsita: Emil Cioran, reprinted in The Aquarian, no. 12/13, trans. Tess DiMilo
Don Paterson (1997)
Seoul’s Dinner
Flowers enter. The flowers with puckered lips. The flowers that fill the back of a truck suck on the wall of the tunnel. The tunnel reddens momentarily. She plucks off the new leaves and shoves them into her mouth. Angelica shoots drop from angelica trees and fall into the dish of seasoned soy sauce. A truckload of angelica enters. Angelica shoots turn the mouth of Seoul green. Flatfish enter. A thousand flatfish packed in ice enter, swooning. A truckload of the East Sea enters. Pigs enter. The pigs oink and suck on Seoul’s lips. She dips the meat from the pig’s neck in pickled shrimp and eats. Her squirming throat is omnivorous. Mudfish pour in like a muddy stream. The Taebaek range is shredded and enters, squirming. The fields of the higher ranges of Mount Srak enter, salted. Radishes revealing only the top half of their white bottoms are neatly stacked onto a truck. Trucks with their lights on enter. They line up and enter in between the teeth. When the trucks leave the tunnel, Seoul’s blue stomach acid embraces them. Some of the trucks with big eyes try to make their way through the sea of acid, but the darkness inside Seoul’s intestine is dense. Greens in sacks enter. Thousands of chickens with reddened crowns follow thousands of eggs just laid today and enter. Bulls as big as elephants their eyes fiercely opened enter. Bulls charge the path inside the body of someone who lives in Seoul. Tonight she drinks too much soju. The tunnel where the liquor is poured is long and dark. White milk that could overflow Lake Soyang pours out of the tunnel into the night’s intestine. The plains of Honam enter. But in the opposite lane, trucks loaded with waste water purifiers have lined up in single file. Having left the party, I begin to vomit as soon as I step outside. Seoul eats and shits through the same door. My body curls up like a worm. It seems that every few days a big hand descends from the sky to roll out cloud-like toilet paper and wipe the opening of Seoul, which is simultaneously a mouth and an anus. Tonight, fat flakes fall as the last truck leaves the tunnel. I let the snow collect, then shove it into my mouth.
Kim Hyesoon (1997), translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi
Christopher Robin
In April of 1996 the international press carried the news of the death, at age 75, of Christopher Robin Milne, eternalized in a book by his father A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, as Christopher Robin.
I must think suddenly of matters too difficult for a bear of little brain. I have never asked myself what lies beyond the place where we live, I and Rabbit, Piglet and Eeyore, with our friend Christopher Robin. That is, we continued to live here, and nothing changed and I just ate my little something. Only Christopher Robin left for a moment.
Owl says that immediately beyond our garden Time begins, and that it is an awfully deep well. If you fall in it, you go down and down, very quickly, and no one knows what happens to you next. I was a bit worried about Christopher Robin falling in it, but he came back and then I asked him about the well. ‘Old bear,’ he answered. ‘I was in it and was falling and I was changing as I fell. My legs became long, I was a big person, I wore trousers down to the ground, I had a grey beard, then I grew old, hunched, and I walked with a cane, and then I died. It was probably just a dream, was quite unreal. The only real thing was you, old bear, and our shared fun. Now I won’t go anywhere, even if I’m called for an afternoon snack.’
Czesław Miłosz (1997), translated from the Polish by the author and Robert Hass
Return to Harmony 3
Two summers? Epochs, then, of ice.
But the air is the same muslin, beaten by the sky on Nanga Parbat, then pressed on the rocks of the nearer peaks.
I run down the ramp.
On the tarmac, I eavesdrop on Operation Tiger: Troops will burn down the garden and let the haven remain.
This is home – the haven a cage surrounded by ash – the fate of Paradise.
Through streets strewn with broken bricks and interrupted by paramilitaries, Irfan drives me straight to the Harmonies (‘3’ for my father – the youngest brother!), three houses built in a pastoral, that walled acreage of Harmonies where no one but my mother was poor.
A bunker has put the house under a spell. Shadowed eyes watch me open the gate, like a trespasser.
Has the gardener fled?
The Annexe of the Harmonies is locked – my grandmother’s cottage – where her sons offered themselves to her as bouquets of mirrors. There was nothing else to reflect.
Under the windows the roses have choked in their beds. Was the gardener killed?
And the postman?
In the drawer of the cedar stand peeling in the verandah, a pile of damp letters – one to my father to attend a meeting the previous autumn, another an invitation to a wedding.
My first key opens the door. I break into quiet. The lights work.
The Koran still protects the house, lying strangely wrapped in a jamawar shawl where my mother had left it on the walnut table by the fireplace. Above, If God is with you, Victory is near! – the framed calligraphy ruthless behind cobwebs.
I pick up the dead phone, its number exiled from its instrument, a refugee among forlorn numbers in some angry office on Exchange Road.
But the receiver has caught a transmission: Rafi’s song from a film about war: Slowly, I so slowly, kept on walking, / and then was severed forever from her. THIS IS ALL INDIA RADIO, AMRITSAR. I hang up.
Upstairs, the window too is a mirror; if I jump through it I will fall into my arms.
The mountains return my stare, untouched by blood.
On my shelf, by Ritsos and Rilke and Cavafy and Lorca and Iqbal and Amichai and Paz, my parents are beautiful in their wedding brocades, so startlingly young!
And there in black and white my mother, eighteen years old, a year before she came a bride to these Harmonies, so unforgivenly poor and so unforgivingly beautiful that the house begins to shake in my arms, and when the unarmed world is still again, with pity, it is the house that is hol
ding me in its arms and the cry coming faded from its empty rooms is my cry.
Agha Shahid Ali (1997)
Thought (1)
You walk through the room and point out things. ‘Table, bowl, chair, photograph, scissors.’
Then you watch how rain drips down the windowpane. You try to remember the drops. ‘Now, now, now’, you say, but the drops fall too quickly; their now is over as soon as you pronounce it.
The drops are people, you think. When they are at the top they are young; at the bottom they are old. You look at the drops just above the window sill. Poor drops. Do they realise that they will die?
You watch how the rain falls on the street. With each drop a little sailboat of water splatters upward. A great many sailboats that exist for no longer than a second. They think they are on their way, you think. Suddenly they exist and believe that they had always been there, and then it is over, then they think nothing anymore.
You look at the boats and think: I think ‘I’! My I thinks with this head!
You think: I am this head!
Esther Jansma (1997), translated from the Dutch by Scott Rollins
The Poet
I made myself into a poet because it was the first thing I really loved. It was an act of will. I realize that now. I was always afraid of asking for things from the devil. I would probably get them. Then I stumbled onto this idea about the purity of the heart. This is a way I could get what I want. To desire one thing, that’s the idea. I knew I could do that. And I already knew what I wanted. To keep doing what I was doing, but to know that it was true. It was right for me to keep doing that, to want nothing else but that. I felt free at last. My life had become a dream. My dream. My life was the cloth of that. Days spent sharing an egg with a cat were good days. With my little red floor & white walls. & millions of men in my bed. It meant nothing. I liked alcohol. What poet didn’t. I woke up in the dreaming poem of the day & made myself a hot black cup of coffee. I would begin. Soon I would want something. A cigarette. That was good. The place I bought them was far enough, a walk, good for my body, something blue for my hand. Who did I think the poet was. A talking dog. Who felt her lips with her fingertips & wrote that down. You see the page for me has terrific dimension. I can go into the white & I do. The lines are designs for something real, how much space around the slender bars I bend and shape in the name of my world. A comma is a little fish, a dash sort of a raft. When we say capitals we mean apples. German words about the same size as God. When you want to refer to that. Its comedy. Sometimes the poem wants to come home. It has a firm back, its left hand margin, sometimes it feels just fine about that. The page is the sky. My typewriter, classic, a wispy one had no spine & so my poems floated like clouds, globs of sunlessness & I marked the world free. Sensationally flat poems I know each line went from there to there was ironic as print felt that way soothed by the cruelty of wasps and was crisper than them, just a season of flat poems. Lonely the loss of rock ‘n roll. It was receding. My poems were flat. A woman made me ache, I was love on the page not yet I had always felt like a brick shit house. I was the poem. The incident in the afternoon the folded sheet, I was the mouth the sounds emitted from I was the pipes of god, me this structure in eternity. Enter it. The oldest dream I remember an important one was about a train in the night going to Germany & I must get on & save myself. Once in a while I say be full, and it is, be slow, oh tear holes in me as the day dies. I have truly become my poems, but do note the sculpture of others, their obliviousness, like architects leaving crumbs. It is not lost my century, thanks to us. We are the liars & thieves, we are the women we are the women I am full of holes because you are. I am the only saintly man in town. Don’t be afraid to be feminine. A girl on a rowboat, full of holes. She saw words shooting through.
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem Page 10