My Tokyo
like the Lord Buddha
almost sitting in this city
I am now being conceived of October’s tedium
my dear girlfriend who walks about nude
in a New York loft
hysterically vivaciously
you will again snake around Masuo’s neck
and beg for kisses
I want to tear that skinny coquettish white nakedness
off from the frame and touch it
it will be very white chalk-white
a sea of desolate solids or
it must be a waterfall of plaster dirt
that when you touch it falls in flakes
the fat pants of the Italian who puts you in a laundry bag and carries it
on his shoulder to the washing place
are visible
the cans of the cheap beer he treats you to
roll empty in the street-floor bar and like rats
they squeal crying
this is America America’s hungry
my closemouthed October
this concrete sullenness
prowls my Tokyo
the bothersome phony tears and brownnosing of phony mankind
that runs around aimlessly overflow
from the jukebox and then
turn into giant shoals of sardines emit evil smells
and flow toward artistic poetic thoughts usual
academic autumn
to all
that saying bye-bye
I enter as I haven’t done for a long time
my interior canal
or infiltrate my interior city
at this city’s entrance at the end of summer
I met a single individual
Amenhotep (king of ancient Egypt)
he’s a nameless youth a modern bus conductor
a butcher racer poet revolutionary other
he’s all the rains what is not all or ancient five thousand years ago
Egypt
its king the eagle that is its amulet the intestines of newly born
crocodiles that become its food
infants’ brains
unguents for rituals pliant dress of hatred time
what are the parts of these and their whole
I held hands with a moment of him Amenhotep
who becomes visible and invisible in this chaos
and plunged into a season of personal performances
about that time
there was the noise of a subway running at the bottom of my city
the womb again on the stage
drums and bass sounding Sandra started her dance
Sandra who’s all black isn’t Salome
a beautiful lesbian black middle class
a sweet lascivious housewife a go-go dancer
a black Santa Maria who turned her husband
into a pale shark a castrated Don Juan
my starting to take the subway
that was my first encounter with Henry Miller
the chamber pot newspapers old letters chairs milk
in every piece of furniture and food I saw
his drinking water- cell- rag-like
life
I’m still a regular user of the subway
I love the subway almost as long as
coitus my subway
is no longer iron a soft flesh shape
a ghost of civilization a cradle of thought now
in this city the subway is
the innermost stomach of meditation
on its ulcer mankind that settled in the city
was clinging somewhat half-asleep half-awake incessantly
spitting out foam from its mouth not words
not roars not pleadings neither smiles
nor words of love nor satisfaction nor battles
but foam
at the Club “so what”
one o’clock at night Max Roach beats his drums
why is he handsome
why do his drums appeal to me lyrically
again awfully fierce rain of sounds at a technical extreme
there the people became numb and the small cosmos
of his music that was played squashed flat
people’s lazy spawning
My Tokyo
this city almost
our womb
I stood at its gate
with Amenhotep and we kissed
then the rain began and then
almost through the duration of linkage we died or had coitus
dying for five thousand years and being born for five thousand years
yawning for five thousand years and continuing to laugh for five
thousand years that will be more than love
everything frogs eggs jam a piece of
blue sky writing paper records flies too
(Let’s dive between the sheets)
that’s the password in our city
someone in solitude dove with a dead cat
someone too handsome a man
shattered the mirror grabbed with all his strength the penis of
himself that was on the other side and fainted
and somebody else incessantly afraid
of his delicate brain and body eating catnip
wailing cowered on the sheets
two young leopards these men
quietly embrace each other in the deep woods of their yearning
those beautiful monkey women in each other’s secret rooms
were casting rainbows of caresses like the glow of morning
about that time
my personal performances continued rapidly sullenly
from October to December during which time
I was in the spider’s web of aphasia acute ecstasy idiotic
philosophizing
where my many selves became the food of the spider
uttered sloppy cries and were captured
one of my selves
escaped took the subway and still
tried to do some music
this may not be love it may merely be
the greetings of the season
but
something was musicked
my own self smeared
on the already new melody and I hear
myself slapping my tail with the fierceness of a crocodile of hatred
but who is it getting thrashed by this tail
who is this soul being called into this music
Ah
at the terminal I see Joe who’s turned into a ghost
he’s been already crushed beneath the sexual roller
and has become gray and a shadow
given up even by the last drop of the storage of life
is he reddish brown iron sand chased into a lazy desert
tangled by a viper roller
the limbs of his will gradually taken by the spider
and rusting on the side of delayed time he’s now
about to lower the last curtain
when I too
am stirring my hot will in the ashes
to clearly give a burial to my city
through many layers of fogs of premonitions
I faintly heard God’s pain
it suddenly became a fiery pain
now for the first time
I see God entire fall in a thunderbolt and in a roar
becoming hot right next to me
almost like eternity it’s momentary
half ill and wounded lying this
in the form of a feeble traveler
my city is
now far in the distance
already a stranger’s face
its concrete head drooping
and sleeping an aimless sleep
Gust
one day suddenly it happens
the sea calm till now stirs
the moment whitecaps rise the wind stands up
just like an invisible transparent rock-cliff
clinging to the belly of the rock-mountain the white houses
the olives the windows the doors
abruptly it slaps them the inside of the house too
the laundry outside too blows it away
even the stones of the rock-mountain it smashes chisels
about to roll them away but
the spikey thorns the crouching olive trees defend them
cover them
hair raised being pushed backward
barely holding their ground the people in their houses
like stones keep silent wait for hours on end
until the wild one the rock-cliff-like wind
that roaring phewwwww phewwww torments this rock-mountain
and threatens
goes away
Yellow Lake
there you can fish tasteful fish
come up on the table but
the lake is yellow and doesn’t show its depths
the Indians living by the lake
don’t show their depths either
whether fish live in their eyes
or tasteful spirits are singing boiling their hatreds
the depths of their eyes are dark and I can’t see anything
by the yellow lake
live those who don’t show themselves on the table
Uluru
I don’t know it’s the beginning or the end of the world
but in Uluru there’s a lizard
an ancient rock-mountain which several hundred millions of years
ago perhaps when the sea had an erection
acquired its red form
can now be seen by rolling up the curtain of the universe
toward the end of the Earth’s skirt
there it’s a desert
though you can’t see them there are the aborigines
since tens of thousands of years ago a lizard
I don’t know his name is solitude or timelessness
but to be alive is a moment’s eternity
so says this tiny sacred lecher
pronouncing Uluru Ulururu deep in its throat
thought crashes into the sea and the stars fly ultra-speed
in an upside direction through the sky where they have yet to fall
in the wrinkles of the Universe the Galaxy or the Phalaxy is just
the West Coast where the spangling waves splash but there
no one sees anyone surfing
is this Earth where ten thousand years ago
poetry lived in Uluru
or 1980 years from now when
the spangling comet approaches the earth
Translations by Hiroaki Sato.
Kazuko Shiraishi, born 1931 in Vancouver, BC, she was taken to Japan by her family just prior to World War ll. Her early involvement was with the avant-garde magazine VOU. Later she became interested in modern jazz, and increasingly she laid emphasis on performance. She has published 15 books of poetry in Japanese including: Seinaru Inja no Kisetsu (Seasons of the Sacred Lecher), 1970; Iso no Canoe, Mirai e Modoru (A Canoe Returns to the Future), 1978; Sunzoku (Sand Clan), 1982; and Taiyo o Susuru Momotachi (Those Who Sip the Sun), 1984. Over the years, she has won numerous literary awards and prizes. Books in English translation include: Seasons of the Sacred Lust: The Selected Poems of Kazuko Shiraishi ed. and intro. Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New Directions,1978). Individual poems have appeared in many anthologies, including: New Writing in Japan ed. Yukio Mishima and Geffrey Bownas (Harmondsworth, England; Penguin Books, 1972); Ten Japanese Poets, trans. Hiroaki Sato (Granite Publications, 1973).
Kazuko Shiraishi appeared in a Festival of Japanese Poetry, bi-lingual reading, sponsored by the Committee for International Poetry in November 1985 at Cooper Union. BOMB would like to thank the Committee for their aid in assembling this material for the Contemporary Japanese Poetry section of this issue.
With severed gills and heads, the sea bream—lives spent / in a lacquered wooden bowl, waiting / on the sullied hands of men—in example / of The Resurrection of Christ, wake from death.
From his earliest spare fictions, Hear the Wind Sing and Norwegian Wood, through his recent, steadily more baroque and textured novels, A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami nudged contemporary realism into fable…
Murakami’s expert manipulation of the mundane into the magical has made him one of the most ubiquitous voices in contemporary fiction.
Originally published in
Linda Hunt, Alexander Liberman, art by Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Barbara Bloom, and more. Cover art by James Nare.
We need our own space to think and digest what we see. And we also have to trust the viewer and trust the power of the object. And the power is in simple things. I like the kind of clarity that that brings to thought. It keeps thought from being opaque.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
