[Four] Factorial

Summer 2005

Copyright © 2005 Factorial & Contributors
Factorial is published annually by Factorial Press.
Edited by Sawako Nakayasu with E. Tracy Grinnell, Brenda Iijima, Paul
Foster Johnson, Sally Oswald.
Copyediting: Paul Foster Johnson
Typesetting & design: Sawako Nakayasu
Many special thanks to: Eugene Kang, Miki Iwamura, Eric Selland, Jerrold
Shiroma.
ISSN 1541-2660
ISBN 0-9754468-3-5 & 978-0-9754468-3-6
http://www.factorial.org/

Contents
Speed Round
Jill Darling 7
Conan Kelly & Jen Tynes 11
Stacy Szymaszek & Brenda Iijima 13
Dante Alighieri (trans. Susan Landers) 17
Robert Quillen Camp 19
Sally Oswald 25
Dana Ward 27

Japanese poetry in English
Kasuya Eiichi 31
Fujiwara Akiko 33
Nishimoto Naoko 35
Abe Hinako 39
Yoshioka Minoru 41
Hirata Toshiko 46
Ogasawara Chōrui 47&

Japanese originals
粕谷 栄市 53
藤原 安紀子 55
西元 直子 59
阿部 日奈子 61
吉岡 実 64
平田 俊子 69
小笠原 鳥類 70

Essay “Assertion is Dadaist”: Takahashi Shinkichi, Japanese Surrealism,
and the Possibilities of Zen by George Kalamaras 75
Collaboration Plus by Jennifer Lowe & Tim Ramick 86
Contributors 99
Acknowledgements, Production Notes, Additional Information 103

Speed Round

Juried by
E. Tracy Grinnell
Brenda Iijima
Paul Foster Johnson
Sally Oswald
duringNovember-December 2004
held back by
The rest of the issue

JILL DARLING
Fugue

1.
every piece of waiting silhouette broken and eating fire burn this pasted
wasted chill passing through spring showers burning the shadow your hairon the wall sideways still tasting the dated messages sent by birds writtenfeathers recorded word on feathers not mere pigeons messenger pigeons.
2.
still wait your place over under each placard side by another word laced
against its placement alongside two words sing back and forth i began here
but kept going from place to hear a cornfield once a particular or the placeof particular dreams a place nonetheless for discovering a bean field forexample plant beans use all beans at your own discretion use the wasting
places reserved for beans as another to call one’s own or play in a place
recorded and owned or reset as a movie back drop this does not have tobe the same as the real think the true place a moving place migrant people
in migrant places assumed or inferred by description of others imagined aplace i like to visit on mondays when my mind is drifting which do you liketo call someplace or another place of memory and what you once understood as skipping from this to another place the place of the desert ride on
into the most frequent or a popular sort of placing different shades different notes exactly where they belong.
3.
one bird calls out to another. every moment after 5am. one bird. and another.
4.
transmogrify: to change in appearance or form, esp. grotesquely.
transmogrification.

7

5.
please trade places with me. that is my seat. excuse me but i prefer that to be
my seat. if i sit in this seat i will have claustrophobia. move yourself. i move
she he it moves. they move out of where i intended to sit.
6.
wasting naked undertones shifted they speak sing themselves into “let me
explain me to you” hooking legs, arms, your job all of our jobs recreated remembered every member back and forth preciously re-put together stacking chairs for example here’s an example stacking every example stacking
every intention b/c it’s all about it’s the basis for the beginning is entirely
about intention.
7.
how did i or did i not intend to use all or few mathematical elements? which
equations did you intend to solve? how many solutions do you intend to understand? which of the answers do you intend as correct? had you intended
for certain clarities? will you be intending any further displays of genius?
do you intend to plan over and beyond your capability? we will be intending to list all of our resources w/in the first table of contents. the second
table of contents is intended for permit use only. please intend to kiss pinksof all shades. i wish to intend your last wishes. she wishes to interrupt
his intention w/ her own. we would all like to intend a brief display of
improvisational mathematical strategy. you should think about the particular missing intentions once optimistically forecasted. sometimes children
intend the opposite of a given response. or the intention of plants not topass through lacking water. she said once of course, that her own intention
included some sorts of clearly marked wishes and colored balloons.
8.
we are all leaning toward creating an entirely new identity. please re-identify
yourself and others. i-dent, indent, entity, entropy, inert-tropy in space of aspace in its place replace about face misnamed renamed hung with lace.
a measure of the amount of energy unavailable for work during a natural process.

8

hypothesized tendency toward uniform inertness, esp. of the universe.
what is your preference?
9.
a tendency to reinvent oneself may result due to one of the following factors, but not limited to, or a combination of any or others not mentioned,
including stress, discord, financial, crime, flee from suicide, head injury,
alcohol abuse, epilepsy, tendency to lie.
10.
what can and cannot be digested registered gestured inflected inflated reflected, a comedy. let me tell a joke to you moment by moment dollars per
minute by the minute slamming lines across wooden flavored alien space or
the interpretation of chinese ideograms every ticking moment of dialogue.
11.
diffuse differentiate a callisthenic adjustment during gravity falling throughnegativity vs. the mystic or a solar station wagon.
12.
my team over your team my monkey wrench painted like a sunset my tools
frozen pass for blades slicing through frozen hell converse at the speed ofwind on the plains in snow against snowballs appearing looming unsent,
unsent bliss which hiss or bleed or bulbous facts molecule by moleculeholding swallowing crystal by crystal swallow.
13.
which colors specifically were available in 1988. these days between space
between the bubbles over a surface across a room of missing the light minus particular syllables minus any certain voice carried over the ivory keys
minus all words all together minus which ever of your particular factors.

9

14.
leaning against a railing of a sort, a fence, blocking one pasture parcel fromanother some trampled path where she stood leaning the old song comingback from most distant coming back like the afternoon filled with party
balloons or remember that once learning to play the piano missing every
note creating new entirely new again an improvisational articulation of
one’s own song witness note by misrecorded note swaying between pastures swaying beside a magnetized hint of once already forgotten and put
into filing cabinets louder with february winds winding leaning on a fence
really it is a bench sitting in a park across from a mural of a pasture passing
dogs passing dog owners thinking who plays the piano notes by notes toexcess by notes after clichéd raindrops certain notes make rain inside music
through a sieve listening for respective and individual notes listening against
passing fancies.
15.
accidentally creating songs written for everyone.
16.
into static moving toward or away from the rain of which she speaks speaking rain of yesterday sidewalks under well thought yellow lights stranded
and hanging over or under the sights you describe to me of those otherplaces you visit during a fugue a feud w/ your identity or your usual location
shifting personae unaltered slit through sliced into component understandings, or the funny taste of canned fruit, as a metaphor.
17.
the relations are more important than the things themselves.

10

JEN TYNES & CONAN KELLY
from From An Only House“second we split up”
It’s weekly this week,parts shopping, parts weekly.
(The improv.)
First the together
turns pushing,second up: Basket the Cart.
When groceries are three —
you
the
by
at store— not looked at not peeked —youIselected
milk
bumble. I am sohungry I could eat two parts.

11

“environment is making light of a thing”
From the yard
boneless chickens
mail and water
mail and water.

12

BRENDA IIJIMA & STACY SZYMASZEK
from Sailor Porn

dear big hunkpilot off the Nellie
my midriff
nice on top of it
burn me lightly
yes Bruno
we’ll go to the steak house
along the bleakestof lakes
I would likethe green beans
ok beauty
this is me
in a dress
so good
on a desk
it was Augustin one of them
M states — an Arabfrom Ann Arborin the offing
hair of your chestas you reverse yourtrip out of me
I like how
you take a bitefrom the centerof the breadand voila . . .
ballshere’s myhome page url¤

13August rust asunder I
scribe with my tenser
finger your buried ploys
there is no land in sightand I crave valleys I
crave the cumbersome
weather ecology ofrandy trees, bellwethersborn of your legging arms
recesses swim
horizon momentum lips
burse coarsely a blue blouse
spitted breeze
plantsthe nested furrowed
inland birds
torque
cries
sour
in
our
kitchensalted frostingon rings
immediate
wrists¤14

I stand exclamatory
at the end of a piera human greeter
a seamarkdid I ever thank you
for the drawingof the big-eyed fish
marvelous as a sun
setting through pollution
I read “momentum hips”
because I watch too much porngoing the way “wherein there is no ecstasy”
and coming out ecstatic
about women and men
just think there are four of us
two upon the dying watertwo who have taken up
qigong as the time passes
¤

15

trim
my
sideburns
with yourpostures oflust
speculativeon this rosy
bulb
ethicschip ourkinship
but eating
steak isa chastityof wheatbe mineon the rainylake
be my pornwell worn
glistening
dresses ethic
dappled nightscape
inexcusable
music
disorderropes
I’ll haveYour footprints

16

DANTE ALIGHIERIfrom Inferno, Canto XXX

The Giants: Mass Emotion of Elemental Force
Ship mast Antaeus rises. / Down there lingers he not. / (Judas with Lucifer
swallows that bottom so.) / Gently down us sets he.
Road another by go I wish. / Antaeus did such leans. / Passing is cloud /a when.
As such a bundle one makes / he of me and himself and you. / Taking
away I of here. / Me comes to say gasp. / Feel us leader mine and I / his
grip mighty as we become as he / in Hercules’ hands / tilled from earth.
You tells him: “Grace lifelong expects and lives / he of art and fame. /(That’s me.) / He gives restores to your lip curled. / Bend us for longer / tolocks Cocytus cold. / Brother to Typhon & Tityus against Jove / down us
set to the earth you likes to make conquered. / You of war high and lions. /O rock of reckoning.”
You tells me: “Farther on found is what wishes you see. / See guilts of all
bottom. / Down us there will put Antaeus unfettered.”And death fear I did. / Ever than more then.
*
Ephialtes shakes violent so tower a shakes. / Earthquake mighty did neverlook as ferocious.
“See shall you his hands bound,” you says. / (My eyes do wish wishes to
see Briareus / immense of arms and legs. / Were it him I would move nomores.)
No god fears / put giant of endeavors great here. / And called is he Ephialtes. / Put he his pride strength against Jove supreme. / Coils cover his
uncovered parts so down / clasped a chain by front and behind.

17

His had he / who bigger and savage more. / But know not do I the mightto shackle him / at this shot crossbow of distances.
*
Farther went we turning. / To him / a his to language for vain. Says you:“Speak not and alone him. / In such is world not language sole. / Nimrod
is this accused. / No language is known by he who makes our sounds
confused.
Chest great across binds him. / Neck ties and passion. / Rage more himself
vents horn. / Fit no psalms sweeter in his mouth. / A fierce: “Gust neverfriend only!”
Coils cloak him of spans great. / Arms both sides along down. / Belly hisof great. / And breast his. / And shoulder his. / Thirty spans of his sees
I / such that above him so fully showed downward with proportions hisbones.
Defense no make can men / against a mind instrument of power great andwill evil. / Nature did well right to give up the makings of such creatures.
*
The pit encompasses bodies there betowered. / Giants horrible that soheaven threats thunder. / Error mine fled. / Fear and me nearer and nearer
with atmosphere murky and thick. / Pierced I the which that out shapes
little by little. / Sight is mist / a when.
The in is them. / Giants but towers not are these. / Deceived is sense. /Much how plainly you see when imagining darkness. What city is this?
*A terrible blast. / Thunder claps no more louds than this. / Day less thannight / less than day. / Little ahead goes sight.

translated by SUSAN LANDERS

18

ROBERT QUILLEN CAMP

Timetable / A Libretto

Start of Opera
This story is about three brothers.
This story is about three brothers.
They go downstairs into the kitchen.
Their kitchen is a bus depot.
Their bus depot is full of strangers.
One of them is dead.
Two of them are dead.
Three of them are dead.
This story is about one brother.
He runs back upstairs. He hides in bed. He sings to himself the story of theride to the furniture store.
In fact there was a furniture store
and in fact I didn’t hate it
and as a matter of fact I went there on a big long bus
and in fact I was alone
and the bus driver may have told some stories about his love life
which was very disappointing
and the store was full of bookcases and the store was fullof chocolate and the store was full of people andI hid inside a very large entertainment center and I hid there
for ten minutes and no one found me and I hid there forten weeks and no one found me
and I hid there for ten years and no one ever found me
One-tenth of the strangers are dead.
Which means there are thirty strangers.
Ten percent of them are dead.
Epidemic.

19

The people in the kitchen have divided themselves into two groups.
One group lives by the stove.
They make a lot of tea.
Their leader is a small man with a microscope.
I am the polymath. I can solve all sorts of crimes.
The others have control of the door to the back porch. They have created asystem of tolls. Their leader has gone outside for a quick smoke.
I can travel freely. That’s my right. My right is to smoke. My rightis to listen to my headphones.
(drum)
There are seven buses in the kitchen. They are all pointed east. Four buses
are green.
This story is about another brother.
He walks over to the food processor. He sings to everyone in the kitchen.
This is my kitchen.
This is my bus depot.
All of your tickets will be collected and stamped and attached to
the refrigerator with the proper magnets.
This is my kitchen.
This is my crime scene.
Your relatives will be informed of all changes to the publishedtimetable.
The factions are taking a break, cooking bacon on the stove, bringing in fruitfrom the backyard. Their leaders are trying to broker an agreement. Threepeople are dead. The polymath collects evidence from the table settings.
These crimes are the work of a madman or a madwoman orthese crimes are the work of madmen and/or madwomen orthese crimes have been made insane after the fact
No one listens.
Thirty strangers
minus three strangers
plus three brothers

20This is my kitchen.
These are my buses.
One bus is leaving the station.
There are 29 seats
There are 27 strangers.
All aboard.
I’ll sit up front. It’s my right. My right is to talk to the operator when the bus is not in motion. My right is to ask about
his personal life when the bus is not in motion. My right is tokeep an ostrich in the luggage compartment beneath the bus.
My right is to read my newspaper and my other newspaper
and my third newspaper.
This is my bus.
This brother does not ride the bus.
This is my kitchen. This is my breakfast. I’ll make some breakfast.
He makes some breakfast for himself and leaves the house. He goes for awalk. He meets a pretty girl and settles down in a neighboring town. They
have six daughters. One of their daughters excels in the study of French
literature and is accepted to an isolated college outside of Montreal. She
makes semi-autobiographical films and shows them to friends and strangers.
She makes a documentary about her father and his brothers. She returns totheir kitchen. She gets on the bus.
This story is about another brother.
He wants to, you know, he wants toI think I’m going to, oh, I think I’ll
He wants to, oh he thinks he might justRight now it’s time I think I’ll bring my suitcase and I might just ridethe bus.
*21

The bus is traveling East, out of the kitchen, through the dining room,
through the living room, through the front hall, out the front door, curving
up the two-lane ramp, merging onto the elevated highway, slipping into thefast lane, disappearing.
There are several mysteries. The bus is equipped with a kind of sonar,
which helps a little bit.
The timetable is distributed to the passengers. They are surprised at its
efficiency in relaying information.
There are several murder mysteries. Most of them occur in the later afternoon.
The polymath has established a non-accredited university, Universe City,
among his followers.
These crimes can be solved through the application of agreed-uponprinciples. These crimes are easily forgotten.
My right is to forget. After the flood ruined my parents’ house I
forgot about their house. And then for three years I travelled in
the New Europe. And for six years I ate tomatoes. And I remembered old songs. My right is to remember.
The bus stops in a small mountain town.
I think it’s nice to stop sometimes when you are on a bus. It’s nice andlovely and motionless. When you stop, I think, you always stop overnight. I think, oh, I think it is excellent to stop.
The bus stops in a small mountain town.
Four P.M.
There is another murder. The polymath withdraws to his books.
Five P.M.
This brother calls home on his walkie-talkie.
Hello?
There is no one there to pick up. He is lonely. He commits a murder.

22

Five Forty-Five P.M.
A bear approaches the bus.
Six P.M.
Someone prepares a dinner.
I’ll eat this dinner.
Six Thirty P.M.
The polymath falls asleep. He dreams of the murderer. They are travelling
together. They are old friends. They tell stories about women and cards.
The polymath talks in his sleep.
Oh, it’s you again.
I’ll tell you more adventures.
But not now.
There’s something in your mouth.
It’s a fish.
You should let the fish drop out of your mouth and fall to the ground.
You should let it thrash on the ground.
You should gently kick it into the water.
You should watch it swim away.
Then we can continue talking.
I’ll eat this dessert.
This story is about three brothers.
This story is about one brother.
He has his head against the window. It is raining. The bus is going slightly
over the speed limit. There are several houses to stop in overnight. This bus
is running express. It will not stop at the furniture store.
Eight P.M.
Most of the passengers have been murdered. That’s what happens.
Nine Thirty P.M.
The bus stops for fuel.
Ten Ten P.M.
The polymath solves the crimes, mostly through elimination.

23

Eleven Twenty P.M.
A bear approaches the bus.
Eleven Forty P.M.
A bear approaches the bus.
Midnight
The bus stops for fuel.
One Twenty-Seven A.M.
The bus arrives on schedule. The bus brakes, the driver turns on the interior
lights, the passenger gets off the bus and grabs his suitcase. He is a shortman, with a dark complexion. He casts around in the dark, looking for thelight switch. He finds it and illuminates the basement depot, which is mainly used to store old papers and magazines. There is an abandoned pingpong table shoved into the corner. He spots the beaten-up sofa behind theentertainment center. He uses his coat as a blanket, curls up on the sofa,
and goes to sleep.
End of Opera

24

SALLY OSWALD

from The Painful Adventures

How To Place The Vanishing Point

The vanishing point must be placed with great care.
If it is too high young women may notice a sensation of air leaving theirwindpipes.
If it is too low young men may be roused from slumber.
A line is placed in the center of the forehead in the hopes that early sexual
memories may be recovered.
At its midpoint we place a token, or maybe it’s a piece of trash, a small toy.
Something totemic to call up these memories and to allay the fears that may
rise up with them.
Its top marks the vanishing point, that is, the precise location where Ms.
Seabottom slips from singing or narrating and into a reverie of seasickheartsick sometimes forward sometimes past.
The vanishing point at this height will give good perspective and well-timed
interruptions.
Let square ABEF create the crying bed.
At its midpoint the plastic fish squirt toy happens.
You could position the plastic fish squirt toy at either the head or the foot of
the crying bed but the usual (and it seems, the best) position is in the middle.

25

How To Locate The Point Of Distance

When the vanishing point is established, we should determine the point of
distance, which is easily located. These points are the furthest-flung morning and afternoon recesses. Beginning at A the birth and B the death wefind C learning to talk and D forgetting one’s name. The tangents CH andHD rise and fall with the heaving chest of the active person. When Ms. Sb
is caught at F, she finds that she is at apex H, where various experiencesintersect. The discerning architect will note that H is outside of the lifeline
AB and its tangents CH and HD. What does H portend? That the inertia at
F pins our heroine from both sides until she speaks the things she knows
along with the things she knows nothing about.

Diagrams and headings by Nicola Sabbattini in Manual for Constructing
Theatrical Scenes and Machines, 1638.

26

DANA WARD

The Lawn
The lawn has no single aptitude test. There,
I feel delicate NORAD of saccharine. O it’s like cakethat I hurt when I see. Trees this pretty
they make the teeth spit. As high as the elbow is
to its own shirt. Come to me cake,
I will sing you the threadbare and delicate
tonal imbalance of cake. To be copied frombreakneck into the reefer, the speechless commissionof velveteen. The shins ache when they press
on that ground and the oak. A yellow flower
pulls close to the almondy many
I hear when the house nears the groundO it’s like cake. The flowering part of the grassblade is yellow. It makes the shins ache when I see
it cannot be elected. There is some beyond Easter
daylight that settles, it’s building a hill
I hope divine intervention can’t climb.
I’ll build my house yellow flowers up there,
especially if there are yellow flowers up there.

27

TranslationsFROM

J APANESE

EIICHI KASUYAJournal of a Drifter
The loneliness on an uninhabited island is due to the silence. And
if it were not for the presence of the trees and the waters, it would bethat much worse, yes, much worse, it would grow to far worse, flaring inviolence.
And it’s the same with the wind. Always blowing west, until the wholeisland has tilted in that direction. Yet for the same reasons, my ramshackle
shack, always in darkness, seems to tower up starkly, against something
there.
Sparkling in sunshine are the bowls and the craziness, which already,and for the same reasons, belong to no one at all. Like a voice breaking,they have all broken off — the last of the footprints, the terror at theend of the hawser cables. And all of the treasures of cranial bones havecrumbled away.
The casks have no meaning. The trees are despair. And because thisisland is an uninhabited island there must be nobody here. And if I’m
someone?
Well, once, on a capeland back in the past, something in the shape of aperson stood watching, stood beyond their capacity to stand there waiting,watching for anything like a ship’s sail.
Don’t anyone ever come! And yet if no one ever comes.
Yes, that’s where the loneliness of an uninhabited island comes from.
On the soul’s sea charts, it’s a dirty blot, it’s a wound torn there.

31

Full Moon
In the black-lacquer night, the quiet full moon rises high into even
quieter skies, and this ascension must happen above a pear tree. Just as itis, this might be called a melody, this ascension that must happen above apear tree.
The far-off sounds from the valley are like death. And so in thatsingle pear tree there must arrive an abundant ripening of pears. Since apear tree beloved by the full moon is more of a pear tree than any otherpear tree, then, below each leaf, there must be a pear like a light shining
there ripening.
Beneath the tree that is like an ecstasy, a woman being embraced bya man must secretly smile and be filled with contemplation, because on
the other side of a hanging bridge of blood, these two, whoever they may
happen to be, are now more themselves than they ever will be. Because
they no longer need names for each other. Because something like a blade,something like a bolt of lightening, has pierced through their bodies completely.
Quietly the light of the full moon is on them. In the midst of apleasure coming to fullness, as if with the dew, everything else must exist
without substance, everything else be unreal. The pear orchard must cease
to be a pear orchard. And the deep valley cease to be a deep valley.
Until the full moon, at long last, carries away all things, even itself, into
the emptiness. Until all things that have endings to come are carried away
to those endings.

translated from Japanese by D.W. WRIGHT32AKIKO FUJIWARA

Dove Garden(Trembles faintly like a compass needle)
A gaze. The dove garden. In the midstof radiating shadows and pure white,
I faded away.
I twistmy fingers and praythat ripples of lost light will be filledwith faint warmth.
You thought I had ended in death.
An area shaken to carve piecesof the body off.
My own death photograph bound by the endsof tiny breathing threads.
(The island in the river has been prepared):
Falling slivers of joy.
A yellow cosmos flower and the spinning child’s cane.
The dew turned to jewels. The blinking light died out.
At the edge of the other world,
people lean against pillars. They lean,
and the cordthat connects all the intersecting
people by their heads
is laughing.
Staring diagonally up like that,the dog’s body saddens me.
(Dragging along an Other self without sin)

33

Childhood comes with heavy shackles and resignation.
Fingers unearth things. Voices get crushed.
The one-cord, torn-off and stiff inside the body’s warm membrane,that hill I cross to experience sin without sin.
Fingers can’t tear into the womb and return.
The flesh heals, embraced by pure hard skin.
The sinless sin less Other laments.
(The young girl shakes, distant)
I grow very small and breathe in water.
Before my eyes, the girl keeps her balance. She has to escape.
Shoulders curved in, almost shaking, I eat the water.
Around and around again, her weak, rhythmical feetengrave the bonelessness of my own curved back. Escape.
Just lean against the pressure of this cramped space and escape.
I’m inhaling water.
(Light pours down, even in the ordinary world)
Inside the nest that keeps the body warm,
my shade cradles its own
beloved bones.
The flower buds all open.
Twisting my fingers to forgive the dead.
All of them.

34

Intermingle Laundrie
Over and over, on the metal chairs near the window, citizens of Mutsu City
adjust the blinds against the afternoon sun.
air
A tripair
air
air(whirwhirwhirwhir)
There was a death

The buds are taking root the stomach rhythmically crunchingThat guy can’t stand that suction-like mouth watery grave markers a figure
Hard to take let’s float here, ugly Someone’s here Oh, it’s a saint’s bones
The naked body, made into a pivot bending the arm still, a mistaken
Intermingling Everyone’s floating here
TandoriCoIn
Laundrie
the damp field, asking nothinga crunching
Intermingling, they can’t hate each other forever Tandori Coin LaunDrie blessed with children (jewels) petals falling straight down right below
There’s a naked body Ai Ai “Mr. Kawakita”
Ai
Ai a jailbreak the dead body from outside it’s female Go out there
An eggplant in a white bag “Mr. Kawakita” Ai AiTurn the neck and turnInto fruit.
Touch the bare wire
Unnoticed
Over and over, on the metal chairs near the window, citizens of Mutsu City
adjust the blinds against the afternoon sun.
Was there a grave marker?
Laundrie
They drew up their legs as if they’d been shoved
To the very bottom
getting lost
Skin darkly ripped apart Tan Tando ri Tando
Ri I love its suppleness a countercurrent. No There’s something’s wrong
With the incense, isn’t there? I apologize quietly in my heart“Kawakita, Mr. Kawakita”

35

Ai On the metal chairs near the window, over and over, adJusting the blinds against the afternoon sun
Mutsu City, Summer 1998: My mother’s spirit did not comeDown to the oracle on Mount Usori Lake (nor today)
I gathered up the whir of pinwheels as I walked
Across the mountain —One thousand, one thousand of them.

translated from Japanese by MALINDA MARKHAM

36

N AOKO N ISHIMOTO

sweet the color thick the smell in shadeheart heavy stand still eyelids droop
slowly surely all moves forward herea transformation repeats repeats not
stoppable not sustainable stupidly
supple burning inviting heated breath
expelling decays rots not even going
mad the pain the pain enjoyed in asweet the color thick the smell in shade37

In the Tree
The birds in the tree are restless and that is how I know it will soonrain. When it rains I plan to go inside and sleep. The rain in the brightafternoon comes in through my eyes and courses endlessly through theinside of my body. The late night rain comes in through my ears and fills
my skull. Soaked with plenty of water, my brain swells. And grows heavy.
My head sways. To the right. To the left.

translated from Japanese by SAWAKO NAKAYASU

38

HINAKO ABEThe Scent of Verbena

that fellow had butterflies in his pocket that’s why he had all those tiny scales on his
fingertips I remember everything that fellow did to me with those scaly fingers
every little thing from the start I planned on remembering and that’s why I
I carried around the pinhole camera it was a hot day still time to go before
noon the wild roses were so dry they looked like they might burst intoflame any minute the very moment we started climbing the logger’s
path sweat was trickling down the nape of his neck the forest
around the path was filled with the songs of carolina wrens
when we reached the sand quarry he practically tore
off his shirt tossed it alongside the path from there
I could tell we were headed toward the manmade
lake at the mountain summit but themore we climbed the more the light
faded into shadow and hisback lost the sunlight
like a retreating
boat growing
cold and
dark
at
the
summitthe sky was asgray and cloudy aslead the clusters ofverbena beside the lake
trembled and released their fragrance
into the cold wind I fell into the strongly
scented growth and pretending I was asleep I
withstood all the things that he did to me with his
fingers covered in tiny scales but beneath his heavy
breathing he muttered the following as if squeezing out the“so it’s really true… I really am the third son of the T family”
when I heard this I let it all out before I knew what I was doing I
could no longer hold in my laughter I opened my eyes wide and said“you’re going to die soon by the time the lake freezes over your corpse
will be lying in a metal coffin pulled up a steep hill by dogs everyone there
will look on with amazement wondering how on earth the dogs were able to pull
it up the steep frozen hill so quickly yes, I see it you are going to die this winter”

39his face grew as pale as gorgonzola cheese and as I watched fissures spread acrossit like it was going to crack apart he pulled back and let up a single shriek
like a heron’s call he looked at me with wildly turning eyes and twisted
his body a few times uncomfortably once he had turned his backon me, he ran away, trampling the pale purple flowers, tripping
and turning somersaults he made no effort to lookback I kept laughing meanwhile a cicada caught
in a bird’s beak cried out like a bell but thesound ceased as its neck broke the bird’s
silhouette took flight stirring the graysurface of the lake as the early
autumn breeze blew over themountaintop carry-ing the strong
scent ofverbenatranslated from Japanese by JEFFREY ANGLES

40MINORU YOSHIOKAfrom

Seibutsu

Still Life
Within the hard surface of night’s bowl
swelling with brightness
the autumn fruits
apples, pears, grapes, and so on
poised one on top of the othermove toward sleep,
to one melody,to a larger music,
extending into darkness
their nucleus slowly inclines,
the abundant decomposition of timesurrounding,
before the teeth of the deadthe various fruits
unlike stones
do not shoot out,
and collecting their weightinside the deep bowl
in the image of nightfrom time to time
hugely tilt.

41

Egg
When God was also absent
and not a shadow of a living thing was present
neither does the smell of death arisein the deep atrophy of the summer noonfrom a crowded zone
things like clouds are torn awayand viscous matter is inundated
in a quiet placea thing is bornsomething suggesting a life
polished with dirt and lightan egg occupies the earth42PraiseFor me, an expansiveness is necessary
desire for echoes of fresh water
one night inside my room
I find a woman’s portrait
and am surprised at its immorality
but in another way am almost moved by it
can’t the functionality of the confusionof objects be guaranteed?
In the corner of a destitute cafeteria
an inquiry
the death of a woman
now, for the very first time,a woman has died in my housethe eyes of the woman in the portrait
recede from the frame
the star which had radiatedfrom within her hairis cloudy and dislocatedafter the whole human race has fallen asleepin the world of cruel existence
I’ll find a new worldin the circle at the end of a piece of rope
the fruits of the autumn trees,
which approach precisely
the reflecting sky
in search of dawn’s nail,are immense
my hunger
and my thirst appear
morning’s lamp crawling over the earth
its fresh revelation of the egg on the tableunaccepted by anyone
my oscillation which is genuine
which surpasses fire, river and humanbrushes off the dew covering my bodyand despite dignity
I change largely
into a young egg-eating beast

43

Still Life
The night wraps them quickly up
the bones
temporarily placed
inside the fish
escape the ocean of stars
and are secretly dismantled
on the platethen the light shifts to another plate —there in its hollow
inherited by the hunger of life
first a shadow falls
then the egg is called in44Still Life
Attached to the cork
inside an empty bottle of wine
our throats
our thin bodies
beautiful snakes that tilt with the scale
our eyes do not have the weight of gold
what must be remembered is the sun
there is always a new distanceand our hearts
entwined in the long pipes of a horse’s intestines
circle around summer’s corridor
to a night sea where there are only jellyfish
half-drowned
our heads
breed things that do not shinetranslated from Japanese by ERIC SELLAND

45

TOSHIKO HIRATA

Momentary Human

Yesterday I was a person. I believe I was a person the day before as well.
Today, too, I woke up and was a person. I can’t recall how long I’ve been aperson. Seems it’s been a while, though. My nose, I blow. Medicine, I swallow. Trim my nails. Buy tickets. I’ve learned to perform most functions. I’ve
even mastered the art of casually returning the favor when someone steps
on my foot. I should pass the next exams with no problem. I should be
graduating this spring. The problem is what comes next.
A friend of mine, also doing the person thing, says his first choice is to become a mannequin. He’s a good-looking man who likes to dress in women’s
clothes. He’d make a gorgeous mannequin. Another friend wants to be alost item. To wear a label saying ‘LOST,’ waiting for someone to pick her
up. There are people who choose Humidity, Proverb, Radiowave, Door —one by one everyone decides what to do next. If I don’t decide soon, I’ll get
left behind like a tombstone. I’ll get stuck being eternally human.
Not good with numbers, so I can’t be a calculator. Allergies, so no plants.
Can’t handle the heat, so no teapot. I don’t have a license to be an electicaloutlet. Anemometer? I’d get dizzy in a storm. Crystal? Too cool; I couldn’t
live up to it.
A stupid question? A silly answer? A belt? Suspenders?
Early autumn? Female convict? A vein? Scenery?
Nothing I come up with is ever quite right. If I fail to decide I’ll turn into
Discontent, Complaint, Ambivalence, and so on. These are human-relatedindustries. I’m trying to get away from people.
I could become a brute, a non-person. Seemingly not human, yet fundamentally so. But if I’m not careful about this I’ll end up a person again.
However, what would a non-person be? How would she spend her days,
wearing and doing what? What would her ideals be? What’s the difference
between a person and a non-person? Where do you draw the line? I’ve got
the person thing worked out, but I have no experience as a non-person. I
don’t even have any non-person friends. I am interested in things I do not
know. Once I graduate from personhood, it may not be a bad thing to go
get some thorough experience apprenticing for a non-person.
translated from Japanese by SAWAKO NAKAYASU
46

CHŌRUI OGASAWARA

Analysis <<Dog>> Healthy Calcium Humans

Because there exists among dogs a clear, solid nutrition inside the backbones of dogs who try to eat backbone. Dog……piano……inorganic objects used likewise for performance. They say that skulls are used as partsof clock parts! I heard such a story I heard it, inside that beautiful soft
maze of a sculpture called the ear a colored air turning was a moving insect
it was fast! Vertebrates are in a zoo called Backbone. There’s no getting
away from the backbone now. I call. Like inserting a metal tongue into adog. A dog is a plural object aligned vertically. Inside — that — dog — alarge — quantity — of metal — parts —— are buried! That person…… Of
a long long deep-sea universe. Inside the jointed arthropod of a spaceshipa large number of insects move, contemplating the ghost food of the universe. The insects are speaking. On the tatami……a jelly-like <sea cucumber>-like thing moving among the dishes must be thinking about moving
the lid and getting out, wants to get out, is how I’ve always thought about
it. Observing the deep sea and regarding the universe I would come toknow about many kinds of animals that are machinous • monstrous andwith many parts. And they were metal. When I eat backbone I see something run a straight line inside myself. Backbone cannot be eaten as is, so I
boil it in water. A creature with a long neck moves its neck, a lake……I
would look back. Is that a freshwater creature too? I can see it. I can see all
the way to the deep sea, because water is a clear substance. The salty freshwater river on the backs of the clear sharp fish is a clear and visible
backbone, and the internal organs run too. The river is replete with moisture. Atop the soft moving boat of a dog, the tilted people shall dine. They
dine out. Things like heads and dried objects were prepared and placed on
their plates. Like rows of flowers. The carnivorous fish would like to eat.
Photo of <the clear fangs of the fish, in the river>. Several hundred years
after being photographed the fish still have the strength to eat. Because fish
are lions……they eat small fish. Fish scales. Perhaps the dogs will be able
to eat it. Over and over at that. And so it is that we find some medicine
which keeps the fish away, and mix it inside dog treats, making the dog
think indeed this is a treat this is a treat, and then the dog thought it was so.
Dogs are admirable creatures, you see, and so we must treat them. If the
dog takes the drugs without fail, then let us sing its praises. It’s okay……
there’s nothing to worry about. A blue animal has its mouth open (prays forgood luck), I harmonize. I’ll be observing the fish in the river. The fish are

47

dining. Just how far in are the fish? When the internal organs of the dog are
the internal organs of the fish, it is forecast that the dog will end. It shall besung like humans: O people who eat organ, please do something about thisworld disease called Dog. And I will harmonize. I will harmonize by myself,
because many things are singing behind me. I think about the animals’ feelings. I think about the animals’ feelings. There are many fish bones inside
the can. We observe what kind of state the fish are in inside of the dog. We
will probably take photographs; the small creatures hide in all sorts of places. Though they are small, they have very fantastic muscles inside. They arechilled in the can they are cold. People will eat bones with fantastic nutrition
for their health. To strengthen our bones. I don’t quite understand thesewords very well, to boil in water. When people eat fish, dogs they sense thislike the universe. They understand this well. Dogs — read — the thoughts —of humans (with curious misunderstandings). And so it is that dogs thinkand come out from buildings of laughing lumber. The lumber laughs. All
ornaments will laugh too. This is what I think, myself like a wood-carved
Disney animal. I had an adventure looking for a dog to play outside with,there were many kinds of animals, it’s exhilarating. Dog ice cream. There issnow on the ground, I get strength from dog, I do not eat dog. I was running with a dog. Side by side with a dog. I was drawing the curves of a dog.
I thought that was how it was. Dog nutrition? Just some water with a dog
running energetically along a mountain road, or add a pinch of salt to somewater……however, there is no limit to the flavors of fish. There are manykinds of fish preparations, fish dishes come alive with spices. On the mountaintop you can see a number of interesting animals. It’s interesting, reallyfascinating. A dog running long-distance. The backbone comes out of thedog. The backbone comes out of the water surface like a dorsal fin andfunctions like a sharp shark. The clear muscles of the dog looked like ashark. I must have seen a shark. Inside, the deep sea sharks are alive. The
great water pressure makes jelly in the deep sea and so on land, too, thedeep sea sharks in the jelly-state walk upon the clear living indigo rocks
where the lively sharks are lined up inside, it’s very movie. The seawatercolored film records this. The feelings of humans are recorded there. Humans are depicted. Magic as if the insides of humans are severed and depicted. Using the force of nature. It’s easy for the backbone to come out ofthe dog, and dogs are creatures that come apart very easily. And at thatpoint the dogs will come out of the zoo. I lined up the dogs. I line up thedogs. Laughing the parlor game where you line up dogs on a board, I placea large amount of metal inside the dog. It looks like a dog. I made a clock,the clock — walks — is an active — very active — dog! ……The backbone
is made of several parts. The backbone moves. The backbone is assembled,
moves and records. It is a clock, a human skull is also a sculpture made of48

glass, was made in the forest we used. The dog is a creature that very much
exercises, so the connections between the parts which form the dog are fun.
Dog transistor. Dogs live as creatures in the sea as if they have come apart.
Dogs carry expressions like metal parts. It was the indigo-brown color ofdried deep-water fish. It’s wanting to go on a walk. It was plural, and pianolike. Lined up like a piano. Every single one must be performing. One
theory goes that if the piano is sounding, the dog is singing. People whowrite scores of music in depth are called composers. Dogs are developed asgraphs. Isn’t it the case that every single part of the dog shall be recorded,
dominated. Many organic colors were used in the statistical figures. I’ll remember my math textbooks. It was something like that. Dinosaurs buried
their skeletons in the earth (fossils), and then curved all the freer underwater, might walk through town. Even wild, pre-vertebrate dogs……in thepast they ate deer in herds, boiled deer spines (the salt!), caught antelope,boiled it (the salt!) and canned it. Can you really make the calcium becomea part of your body by eating this. From the calcium……to the calcium…
it’s really quite surprising. A long, connected calcium is running, and like anarrow will penetrate some other animal. There are many events in the
Olympics. When I watch animals like deer and wildcats they were runninglike spaceships. Large. What does this mean, even the poisonous underwater animals, let out neither their poison nor their voices. Don’t let out?
Purple? Fluid? That is a precaution. The deep sea is quiet, only the soundof shrimp resonate. But dogs will enjoy their days until they are twelve,
sixteen (a long life) years old. In a good environment, with love, or by eatingmineral upon mineral they shall live long live long, dogs that eat the food ofdogs. The soft mouth of a dog opens and closes. There is not much variation in the sound of a dog eating, and makes a crumbling sound like theconstant operation of many soft rocks. Inside the can, the meat of thethoughtful thinking fish is very important. The dog is formed when it eats
the bones of fish. Because creatures constantly emphasize the movement
movement called being formed while breaking apart, they eat and……
which means that it is not to say that they stay there like a rock forever at
the south pole without transforming, right? Dogs are different from cats.
Dogs are —dogs are — different from — cats. And so it is that the meals offish exist in order for constant formation. Because fish are very nutritious.
Fish are fantastically nutritious, and when you eat fish, information that you
did not previously have comes one after another into your brain. Because I
saw —the rainbow colored — bones of — fish — those kinds of — thosekinds of — things I didn’t know? I did not know. And then, people, will
make dogs that are very useful to humans. Dogs are like clay and are not thesouth pole, they are interesting in a warmer place, they move move, aresculpted on the snow, are placed down and are moving. Muscles are like49

clay, clay will be used to restore fossilized animals. I will place it on my desk.
Dogs eat bones. Lion-fighting dogs. You can chew them apart and chew
them apart and they still live. And then they shall move like clay and stick to
the lion. Dogs are invertebrates (in this case) and is a brown map that canspread out much huger than a lion. It is a continent. And that is a very
heavy, off-putting dog. The lion wrapped in dog is a walking creature ofmeat is a resistance. An old map is a wide fish like a dried animal. Lion anddeer heads were also lined up on the tastefully patterned wall. They stick tothe bottom floor of the deep sea awaiting the shrimp to come. They are
fixed there, and will probably wait tens of thousands of years. It is a fantastic unnatural paradise where lively mollusks live. The dog is now, in whatkind of a state, what kind — what kind — what kind — what kind — ofstate — does it have to be in — to call it — appropriate — is it appropriate — this we — observe in the lined up paws of the dog, and watch. The
bottoms of the dog’s paws are like very dry fruit from the south. The dog’spaws, and only the paws, only the paws, are countries like islands in a row
are there. They were <the countries of the world>. The paws of the dogs,
only the paws, form a line on the sand. The dog paws are walking. The dog
paws, only the dog paws, are walking. On the sand a large quantity of dog
paw prints form a line, forming flower-like figures. And it looks like a dog.
On the island, it is a quiet thing, not the record of some incident. In thetrees there are times you see many of the bottoms of the dog’s paws……
the boiled fish bones eat through every part of the dog and come out! Actually, it is a creature of the rectangle of an aquarium from several hundred
million years ago, was an invertebrate south pole animal with a surprisingnumber of legs.

translated from Japanese by SAWAKO NAKAYASU

50

JapanesePOEMS

KASUYA EIICHI
粕谷 栄市

漂流記

無人島の淋しさは、その静けさから来る。樹や水が無ければ、未だしも、それ故に、それは、一層、募るのだ。
風も、亦、同じである。常に、西へ向けて、島の全てを、それは、傾ける。そのために、襤褸のような私の小屋は、常に、暗く、何かに屹立したものになるのだ。
日に輝く、椀も狂気も、それ故に、既に誰のものでもない。足跡の果て、恐怖の鋼索は、声のごとく、断たれてる。頭蓋骨の財宝は、全て、滅びているのだ。
樽は、無意味である。樹は、絶望である。そこは、無人島だから、人間はいないのだ。若し、私が、人間であるならば。
唯、過去の岬に、人間のかたちをしたものが、帆のようなものを待って、いつまでも、佇ち尽くすのである。
誰も来るな。しかし、誰かは来なくては。
無 人 島 の 淋しさは、そこから来る。魂 の 海 図 の、それ は、汚 点である。それは、疵である。

53

満月

漆黒の夜の静かな満月が、さらに静かなその天に上るのは、一本の梨の樹の上でなければならない。そのまま旋律と呼んでよい、一本の梨の樹の上でなければならない。
遙かに、谿の音は死のように聴こえ、梨の樹には、そして沢山の梨が実っていなければならない。満月に愛される梨の樹は、梨の樹のなかの最も梨の樹であるものだから、その全ての葉裏に、灯のように沢山の梨は実っていなければならない。
歓喜のような、その樹の下には、そして、ひとりの男に抱かれたひとりの女が、秘かに笑って瞑目していなければならない、血の吊り橋のかな
たで、二人が何であろうと、そこで、二人は、最も二人であるのだから。もう、どんな名前も要らないのだから。刃のようなものが、稲妻のようなものが、完全に二人を貫いているのだから。
満月は、静かに二人を照らす。露のように満ちる悦楽のなかで、そして、他の一切は、架空のものでなければならない。梨畑でない梨畑とならねばならない。山峡でない山峡とならねばならない。
満月が、やがて、自らとともに、何もかも虚無へと連れ去ってしまうまで。全て、終りのあるものを終らせてしまうまで。

54

FUJIWARA AKIKO
藤原 安紀子

鳩の園（指針の震えるが如く微細に）
眼差し

鳩の園

衰微した私

放散する影と純白の中で指を縒り失った光の余波は視えぬものへの温もりに満ちてゆかんことをあなたは祈り

本當に死んで終う と想った部位を削ぐように

震り 切られた

生吹く繊毛の先に結ばれた

断面

私の遺影

（中洲が整備され）削ぎ落とす悦楽
黄花コスモスと廻る子供のつえ
露は珠になり 点滅は消え失せた
同じ柱を背に結界の柱を背に交差する人の頭の緒は笑っている

斜め上を見詰めている
犬の屍が余りに哀しい（罪なき分身を引き摺りながら）諦めと巨きな枷を所有した幼さ

指は掘り起こす

声は潰されてゆく

剥がれた堅い〈片緒〉体温の膜の中
罪なき罪を実感として越える丘
私の指は母胎を刻み返すことは出来ない
貞潔の硬い肌を抱いた肉は癒え
罪なき罪なき分身は慟哭する55

（少女は遠く揺れている）
わたしはとても小さくなって水を吸い込む
眼前の少女はバランスをとり にげなければ出来る限り肩を屈ませ震えるように水を喰む
まわりまわり 何度も踏歌する弱い足
屈めた背の無骨さを刻印するにげろ小さくした巾の重圧に凭れてにげてゆけ

水を吸っている（日常にも降りてゆく光）
体温を保った巣のなかで
私の遺影は愛しい骨を握る
あの花の蕾は皆咲きます

死者に許しの指を縒り悉く

56

交接ランドリエ

窓際のパイプ椅子と西陽を何度もブラインドで調節するとしてむつ市民
空

空

空

空

（カラカラカラカラ）
旅

死であった

芽が巣喰っている
ヤッコ

はら

定期的に噛み砕き

吸付き口元は耐え難い

水塔婆

姿

堪え難く 醜く浮いていよう と人 と舎利裸体をし軸とする

腕曲り 見違えるままの交接

まわりみな浮いている タンドリ コ

イン

ランドリエ

不問の湿原

憎み切れずに交接
ドリエ

子宝に芽ぐまれ

には裸体
アイ

噛み砕き

タンドリ コイン
ま下に落花

ラン
真下

アイ アイ 「川北サン」 アイ

破牢

曇天からし体牝

出でて白イ袋にナス「川北サン」 アイ アイ

首を真和し果実になって気付かれぬように
線裏に触れる

窓際のパイプ椅子と西陽を何度もブラインドで調節するとしてむつ市民
塔婆ありましたか

ランドリエ

ひざ起てていたんだ

底突くように迷っている57

肌くろく血切れタン

リ 弾力恋しいね

タンド リ タンド

逆流いいえ

心密かに

謝りながら

「川北サン

川北サン」

アイ

線香の精

窓際のパイプ椅子と西陽を何度もブラインドで調節するとして一九九八年夏むつ市の宇曽利山湖に母の霊は降りていない （今日も）かざぐるまの音をヤマじゅう比呂って歩いたが千本千本58

N ISHIMOTO N AOKO

西元 直子

59

木の中で

木のなかで鳥が騒ぐからそれでもうすぐ雨が降るのだとわかる。雨が降ってきたら家に入って眠ろうとおもう。あかるい昼まの雨は目から入ってきてからだの内側を流れつづける。おそい夜の雨は耳から入ってきて頭蓋のなかでいっぱいになる。たっぷりの水を吸って脳は膨れる。そして重くなる。頭がゆれる。右にゆれる。左にゆれる。

60

ABE HINAKO

クマツヅラの薫り

阿部 日奈子

あの人はポケットに蝶を入れていました

だから指先には鱗粉がいっぱい

粉だらけの指先であの人が私にしたことはらそのつもりでした
暑い日でした

残らず憶えています鱗

始めか

そのつもりで針穴写真機を携えて行ったのです

正午までにはまだ間のある時刻

野茨の藪は今にも燃え出しそうなほど乾ききり 木材搬出路を登り始めたとき
うなじから あの人の項には汗が滴っていました
ライナミソサザイが啼く雑木材

左右はカロ

砂利採掘抗跡までくると あの人は毟りとるようにシャツを脱ぎ道端に投げ捨てました
かっていることは山頂の人造湖へ向この辺りでおおよそ察しがついていました ところが登るにつれて日が翳り あの人の背中は冷えて黒ず
んでゆく鉛のようにのっぺりと光を
失っていっ
たので
す

61

山
頂に立
つと空はど
んより曇り 湖
畔ではクマツヅラの群生が肌寒い風に芳香を放って揺れていました

きつ

い匂いの茂みに倒れ込み

鱗粉だ

らけの指先であの人が私にしたことは眠ったふりをして我慢していましたけれ

どあの人が荒い息遣いの下から絞り出すような
声で

＜そうか

俺はやはりT家の三男だったのか＞と言うのを聞いたら思わず噴き出してしまったのです
こら

笑いの発作がこみ上げてきて堪えきれず
言ってやりました

ぱっと目をあけて＜あなたはもうじき死ぬのよ

湖に氷が張る頃

あなたの死体は亜鉛の柩に横たえられ犬橇に括られて急斜面を登るでしょう 凍った斜面をどうしてあれほどの速度で登れたものか
達は皆不思議がるでしょう この冬あなたは死ぬの

62

見物の人

私には見えているのよ＞

あの人の顔色ときたらまるでゴルゴンツォラ・チーズでした
亀裂が入って罅割れそうでした

みるみる緑色の＜ギャーッ＞とひと声 ゴイサギみたいな叫声をあげて飛びのくと グルグルまわる目玉で私を見て
よじ

狂おしく

二度三度身を捩りました くるっと背を向けてからはもう一目散にじ

薄紫の花の穂を蹴散らし踏み躙りもんどり打って逃げて行きながら あの人は決して振り返ろうとはしませんでした
私は笑い続けました

ニ ワ ウ ル シ

頭の上の天国の木にカラスが飛んできてとまりました

くわカラスは蝉を咥えて呼鈴のように鳴っていましたと頭がもげて声が止み

ぽろっ

鳥影が羽

搏いて飛び去ると あとには
灰色の潮面を波立たせて初秋の風が吹き渡り
辺り一面 クマ
ツヅラの強
い薫り
が

63

静物 （抄）

静物

夜の器の硬い面の内であざやかさを増してくる
秋のくだものりんごや梨やぶどうの類それぞれはかさなったままの姿勢で眠りへ
ひとつの諧調へ
大いなる音楽へと沿うてゆく
めいめいの最も深いところへ至り
核はおもむろによこたわる
そのまわりをめぐる豊かな腐爛の時間
いま死者の歯のまえで石のように発しない
それらのくだものの類はいよいよ重みを加える
深い器のなかで
この夜の仮象の裡でときに大きくかたむく64

YOSHIOKA MINORU
吉岡 実

卵

神も不在の時いきているものの影もなく
死の臭いものぼらぬ
深い虚脱の夏の正午
密集した圏内から雲のごときものを引き裂き粘質のものを氾濫させ森閑とした場所にうまれたものがある
ひとつの生を暗示したものがある
塵と光りにみがかれた一個の卵が大地を占めている

65

讃歌

ぼくには拡がりが必要だ
さわやかな水の響が希われる
ある夕べの部屋で女の肖像をみつける
ぼくはその不倫にとまどう
別の意味で感動しようとする物の混同の機能を証明できないか
きわめて貧しい食堂の隅詮索する
女の死
いまはじめてぼくのうちで女は死んだのだ
枠から遠ざかる肖像の中の女の眼
その女の髪の中で輝いた星はいま曇って外れている
残酷な生存の世界から全人類が眠った後
ぼくは一本の縄の端の円で新しい世界
夜明けの釘をさがす
反映する空へ正確にちかづく
秋の木の実が夥しい
ぼくの飢え
ぼくの渇きが現われる
地上を這う朝のランプ
その新鮮な啓示の卓の卵
何ものにも容れられてない
ぼくの純粋なる振動
火

河

人間をこえ

全身の露をはらいおとし
りりしくも卵を啖う若い獣へとぼくは大きく転身する

66

静物

夜はいっそう遠巻きにする
魚のなかに仮りに置かれた骨たちが星のある海をぬけだし
皿のうえでひそかに解体する灯りは他の皿へ移る
そこに生の飢餓は享けつがれる
その皿のくぼみに
最初はかげを
次に卵を呼び入れる67

静物

酒のない瓶の内のコルクにつながれる
ぼくらの咽喉ぼくらのかぼそい肉体
秤とともに傾く美しい蛇
ぼくらの眼は金の重みをもたぬ
記憶すべきは太陽
つねに新しい距離があり
ぼくらの心臓は馬の腸のながい管を巻かぬ
夏の回廊を一廻りしてくらげばかりの夜の海へ半分溺れたまま
ぼくらの頭
光らぬものを繁殖する

68

ひとときの人HIRATA TOSHIKO
平田 俊子

きのう私は人であった。おとといも確か人だった。きょう目覚めても人である。いつから人なのか思い出せない。かなり長々と人だった気がする。
鼻を、かむ。薬を、のむ。指切りをする。切符を買う。大抵のことはできるようになった。足を踏まれたらさり気なくお返しをするわざも体得した。
次の試験は大丈夫だろう。春には卒業できるだろう。その後の進路が問題である。
同じく、人をしている友 人 の ひとりは、第 一 志 望 はマネキンだと言った。女装の好きな、いい男である。華やかなマネキンになるだろう。別の友人は、落とし物だと言った。
「落とし物です」と名札に書いて、誰かが拾いあげてくれるのを待つと。湿度になる人、ことわざになる人、電波になる人、ドアになる人、みんな着々と進路を決める。私もそろそろ決めてしまわねば、墓石のように取り残される。永遠に人のままとなる。
数字に弱いので電卓はムリだ。花粉症なので草花もダメだ。猫舌だから急 須はイヤだ 。資 格 がないので、コンセントにはなれない。風 速 計
は？ 台風のときに眼がまわる。水晶は？ かっこよすぎて気がひける。
愚問は？ 愚答は？ 帯は？たすきは？
初秋は？ 女囚は？ 静脈は？ 情景は？
どれもこれも今ひとつ満足できないものばかり。このまま決めかねていたのでは、不平、不満、迷いなどというものになる。これらは人の関連産業。もう人からは離れたい。
人でなしというのもある。これは、人でないと見えて、その根本は人である。うっかり選ぶとまた人である。だが、人でない人とはどんなだろう？どんななりをして何をして過ごすのか？ その理想とするのは何なのか？ 人と人でなしとではどこがどう違うの か？ その 境 目 はどうなっているのか？ 私は、人は体得したが、人でない人の経験はまだである。人でなしの人に知り合いもいない。知らないものには興味をいだく。人を卒業した
ら、人でない人のもとで、じっくり就業してみるのも悪くないかも。

69

解析《犬》健康カルシウム人間

OGASAWARA CHŌRUI

小笠原 鳥類犬の中に背骨を食べようとする犬の背骨には透明な硬い栄養があるので。犬……ピアノ……並んで演奏のために用いられる無機的な物体。頭蓋骨は時計の中で部品の一部として用いられるという！ そのような話を聞いたのだ聞いたのだ、耳という美しい柔らかい彫刻の迷路の中を色彩のある空気が曲がって動く虫だったことだよ速い！ 脊椎動物は背骨という動物園に入っているのだ。もう背骨から逃げられない。呼ぶ。犬の中に金属の舌を入れるように。犬は縦に並んでいる複数の物体なのだ。あの――動物の――中に――大量の――金属が――部品が――埋められている！ あの人……それは長い長い深海の宇宙の。関節がある、節足動物である宇宙船の中に大量の虫が動いて、宇宙の妖怪食物について考える。虫が話しているのだ。それは畳の上で……食器の中で動くゼリーのような〈なまこ〉のようなものが蓋を動かして外に出ようと思うだろう、出たい、私はそのようにいつでも思っていた。深海を見て宇宙のことについていろいろな生き物を知るだろうそれは部品が多い機械・奇怪なのである。それは金属であった。背骨を食べると私の中で真っ直ぐに走っているものを見ます。背骨はそのままでは食べられないので水煮にして。首が長い生き物が首を動かすだろう、湖……私は後ろを見るだろう。あれも淡水の生き物？ 見える。深海まで見えるのだ、水は透明な物体なので。透明な鋭い魚が背中から塩味の淡水の河は透明な見える背骨であり、内臓も走っている。河の中で水分が充実している。犬という軟らかい動く舟の上に、傾く人々は食事をするだろう。外で食事をするのだ。食器の上には頭や、乾いた物体が調理されて置かれた。並べられている花々のように。肉食の魚は食べたいのである。
〈河の、魚の透明な牙〉写真。撮影された後の数百年後の魚も食べる力を持つ。魚はライオンだから……小魚を食べるのだ。魚の鱗。犬が食べられるかもしれな
い。それが何度も何度も。というわけで、魚が来ないようにする薬を、犬のための菓子に混ぜて、なるほど、これは菓子である菓子であると犬に思わせ、犬はそのようであると思った。犬は偉い生き物だからね、犬を治療するのです。薬を確実に食べたら犬に偉いと歌ってあげましょう。大丈
夫だよ……何も心配することはない。青い動物が口を開いている（幸運を祈る）私は合唱している。河の魚を観察するだろう。魚は食事をしてい70る。魚はどこまで入っているの？ 犬の内臓が魚の内臓である時、犬が終わるということが予告される。内臓を食べる人々、犬という地球の病気を何とかしてください、人間のように歌うだろう。私は合唱するのだ。私は一人で合唱する、私の後ろで多くのものが歌っているから。動物の気持
ちを考える。動物の気持ちを考える。缶詰の中には、魚の骨がたくさん入っています。魚が犬の中でどのような状態であるかを見ます。撮影もするだろうし、小さな生き物はいろんな所に隠れます。小さいのに、中にはとても素晴らしい筋肉がある。缶詰の中に冷えている冷たい。人は健康のために、素晴らしい栄養のある骨を食べるだろう。私達の骨を強くするために。水煮、という言葉がどういうことであるかがよくわからない。人が魚を食べると犬は宇宙のようにそれを察知する。よくわかるのだ。犬は――人間の――考えを――読むのだ（興味深く間違っている）。とい
うわけで笑う木材の建物から犬が思う出て来る。木材が笑っているのだ。あらゆる置物は笑うだろう。木彫りのディズニー動物のような私はそのように思っている。一緒に外で遊べる犬を探して冒険した、いろいろな動物がたくさんあり、爽快な気分になる。犬アイスクリーム。地面には雪があるだろう、犬からパワーをもらう、犬を食べるのではない。犬と一緒に走っていたのだ。犬と並んでいた。犬の曲線を描いていた。そのようであると思っていた。犬の栄養？ 元気に山道を走る犬を水だけ、または水に少量の塩を加えて……でも、魚には無限の味がありますから。魚の調理にはいろいろな種類があるんだ、魚料理は香辛料によって生きる。山の上では面白い生き物がたくさん見られる。面白いなあ、本当に面白いんだ。長距離を走る犬。犬から背骨が出て来る。背骨は背鰭のように水面から出てきて鋭い鮫として機能する。犬の透明な筋肉が鮫のように見えたのだ。鮫が見えたのだろう。中に、深海の鮫が生きている。凄い水圧は深海でゼリーを作っているから陸地でもゼリー状の中で深海の鮫は生き生きしている鮫の入った並べられた透明藍色岩石の生きている上を歩いている、とても映画だ。海水色のフィルムは記録する。そこに人間の気持ちが記録されているのである。人間が描かれている。人間の中を切断して描いているように奇術。自然の力を利用するのだ。背骨は犬から出てくることが容易であるし、犬はとてもばらばらになりやすい生き物
なのだ。その時、犬は動物園から出てくるだろう。犬を並べた。犬を並べる。板の上に犬を並べる室内ゲームの笑って、犬の中に大量の金属を入れる。それは犬に見える。時計を作ったのだ、時計――歩いている――
活動的な――とても活動的な――犬だ！……背骨はいくつかの部品でできている。背骨は動いている。背骨は組み立てられて、動き記録するだろ71

う。時計なのだ、人間の頭蓋骨もガラスでできている彫刻であり、用いられている森林の中で作っていた。犬はとても運動する生き物なので、犬を形成する部品同士のつながりは楽しい。犬トランジスタ。犬はばらばらのようになって海水の中の生き物として生きている。犬は金属部品のように表情を持つ。深海魚の干物の藍色の褐色の色彩であったよ。これは散歩に行きたがっているのですよ。これは、複数であり、ピアノのようだった。ピアノのように並んでいる。一つ一つが演奏しているだろう。ピ
アノが鳴っていると犬が歌っている、という説があるのだ。楽譜を詳しく書く人は作曲者であると呼ばれる。犬はグラフとして展開される。犬のあらゆる部分を記録するだろう、制覇するのではなかろうか。統計の図
形にはいろいろな有機的な色彩が用いられた。私は数学の教科書を思い出すだろう。そのようなものであった。恐竜は骨格を地中に埋めて（化石）、より自由に水中を曲がった、街を歩くかもしれない。野生の、脊椎動物以前の犬も……昔は彼らは群れで鹿を食べたり、鹿の背骨を水煮（塩分！）にして、レイヨウをつかまえ、水煮（塩分！）にして缶詰に入れている。これを食べて本当にカルシウムを自らの体の一部にすることができますか。カルシウムから……カルシウムに……本当に驚きます。長い、つながったカルシウムが走っている、矢のように別の動物に侵入するだろう。オリンピックにはいろいろな競技があります。鹿や山猫のような動物を見ると宇宙船のように走っていった。大きい。どういうことだろう、海中の有毒動物も、毒も声も出さない。紫色の？ 液体を？ 出さない？ それは警戒なのだ。深海は静かだ、海老の音しか響いていないよ。しかし犬は十二歳まで、十六歳（長生き）まで毎日を楽しむだろう。よい環境と、愛情があれば、あるいは鉱物を次々に食べさせ長生き長生き、犬の食べ物を食べる犬。犬の軟らかい口が開いたり閉じたりする。犬の食事の音にはあまり強弱がなくて、軟らかい石をいくつも操作しているような崩れる音なのである。缶詰の中で、考えている思っている魚の肉はとても大事だ。魚の骨を食べると犬が形成される。生き物は常に壊れながらできあ
がってくるという動き動きを重視しているものなので、食事し、……ということは岩のようにそこに常に変形せずに南極にあるということではないのね？犬はネコとは違う。犬は――犬は――ネコとは――違う。というわけで、常に形成されるということのための魚の食事があるんだ。魚は栄養がありますから。魚には素晴らしい栄養があり、魚を食べると頭脳の中に、それまで知らなかったような情報が次々に来るのである。魚の――虹色の――骨を――見たので――そのような――そのような――知らなかったことが？ 私は、知らなかった。そして、人は、人間のためにとても役に72

立つ犬を作るだろう。犬は粘土のようなものだし南極ではない、もっと暖かい場所で面白い、動く動く、雪の上で彫刻され、置かれていて動いている。筋肉は粘土のようだ、粘土を使って化石動物を復元するだろう。机の上に置くのだ。犬は骨を食べる。ライオンと戦うための犬です。食いち
ぎっても食いちぎっても生きている。そして粘土のように動いてライオンに貼り付くだろう。犬は無脊椎なので（この場合）、ライオンよりも巨大に広がることができる褐色の地図なのだ。大陸である。それはとても不快な重い犬なのだ。犬に包まれたライオンは肉の歩く生き物である抵抗なのだ。古い地図は干した動物のように広い魚である。趣味のある模様のある壁にはライオン、鹿の頭も並べられていた。深海の底に貼り付いて海老が来るのを待つのである。固定して、何万年も待つだろう。生き生き
軟体動物の生きる素晴らしい不自然の楽園なのである。犬が今、どういう状態であるか、どのような――どのような――どのような――どのような――状態で――あると――それを――呼ぶことが――妥当か――妥当
か――ということを、犬の並ぶ足を観察して、見る。犬の足裏はとても乾燥した南の果実のようだね。犬の足が、足だけが、足だけが、並んでいる島のような国々があるんだ。それは〈世界の国々〉であった。砂の上に犬の足が、足だけが並ぶ。犬の足が歩いている。犬の足が、足だけが歩いている。砂の上には犬の足跡が大量に並び、花々のような図形を形成している。それは犬に見える。島で、何らかの事件の記録ではない静かなものだ。木々には犬の足の裏をたくさん見ることがある……犬の随所を食い破って魚の骨の水煮が出て来る！ 実際には、数億年前の水槽の矩形の生き物であり、驚く数の脚がある南極の無脊椎動物であった。

73

GEORGE KALAMARAS“Assertion is Dadaist”: Takahashi Shinkichi,
Japanese Surrealism, and the Possibilities of Zen
DADA asserts and negates all.
Infinity, naught — only reecho the sound “cigarette,” “waistband,” or “word.”
What gushes in imagination is reality.
The whole past is contained in the soybean’s future.
Each man and his brother imagine that fantasies beyond reach of man
can be thought of by a stone or a sardine’s head.
DADA finds the self in all.
In the air’s vibration, in the hatred of a germ, and in the stink of the word
“self,” there too it finds the self.
All is not two. A saying from the Buddha’s clear vision emerges: all is all.
All is seen in all.
Assertion is all.1

Three major literary figures come to mind among the many artists whoembraced the excitement of Surrealism in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s,
one of whom — Takahashi Shinkichi2 — was actually a self-proclaimed
Dadaist. These writers were attracted to the French avant-garde, which
made its way to Japan primarily through translations of poetry and poetics
by Nishiwaki Junzaburo, an adept linguist fluent in French and English,
whose own poetry and theorizing were also influential. While volumes ofhis poetry are well known and plentiful, his books of essays and translations outnumber his books of verse and are considered pivotal in thedevelopment of Japanese modernism. While abroad in England in 1925,
he published his first book of poetry, Spectrum, in English. After a stay inFrance (where he unsuccessfully attempted to publish a second book in
French), Nishiwaki brought back the first books on Surrealism to Japan.
Surrealism, however, was theorized and practiced in a more profound way
by Nishiwaki’s student Takiguchi Shuzo, certainly Japanese Surrealism’s
greatest proponent. Takiguchi, while initially writing poems in the traditional tanka form, translated André Breton’s Le surréalisme et la peinture in
1930 at age twenty-seven, and was arrested in 1941 and imprisoned fornine months because, as Hiroaki Sato notes, “he advocated Surrealism”(41). Takiguchi has said of his verse that “[w]hat matters is nothing otherthan the embodiment of the thought that relates the surreal and the realconstantly to human liberation, the idea that could only sound abstract, theconcept that seems to address itself only to the eternal revolution” (qtd.
in Sato 41). A third figure is Takahashi Shinkichi, author of Japan’s first75

Dadaist text (both a poem and manifesto rolled together in the traditionof Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist manifestoes, “Dangen wa dadaisuto,” literally,“Assertion is Dadaist”).
I must confess that my choice of major figures is partly idiosyncratic, basedon my love of the work of these three poets — but only idiosyncratic toa point, as Nishiwaki and Takiguchi are often cited as important “founders” of Surrealism in Japan.3 I add here, however, a self-proclaimed nonSurrealist, Takahashi, since these three writers figure a constellation for me,
much in the way that I gravitate toward the work of three writers directly
or indirectly associated with Surrealism in France — André Breton, Robert
Desnos, and René Daumal — not because they are considered the central
figures of French Surrealism but because I find in them a generative combination of Surrealist aspects that each foregrounded as part of a reciprocal
whole: Breton’s monumental theorizing and quest for the marvelous;Desnos’s incredible love poetry with its cosmogonic reach and his spiritualjourneying central to Surrealism’s early period of “hypnotic sleeps”; andDaumal’s role as literary and spiritual outsider whose self-imposed exile
from Surrealism became an enabling constraint tacitly shaping the movement in ways continuously spiritual, keeping it grounded in the hermetic
traditions that gave it shape.
I do not want to draw too easy of a parallel here, tempting as it is toread both Nishiwaki and Takiguchi as encompassing two aspects ofBreton’s triumph: the theorizing in the Manifestoes and the enactmentof psychic automatism especially prevalent in Breton’s 1919 collaboration with Philippe Soupault, The Magnetic Fields. Certainly, Nishiwaki’s
and Takiguchi’s leadership in Japan parallels the impact of Breton’s
Manifestoes; likewise, Takiguchi’s automatic prose poems (some of themost profound and beautiful writings of the Japanese movement) mightfind a comparison to the primitive, youthful ebullience of The Magnetic
Fields. But I hesitate to draw such a comparison, for it suggests a kind ofcolonization, inviting a hierarchical reading of Japanese Surrealism as
simply mirroring a larger French approach, erasing the individual culturalcontexts that shaped the French and Japanese movements, and conflating
Surrealist poetics so as not to suggest parallel enterprises but, unfortunately, to cast Japanese Surrealism as merely a Far Eastern enactment of Frenchthought. In a 1938 article focused on the problems of avant-garde art,
Takiguchi argues that Japanese Surrealism cannot be a Far Eastern rendering of its French counterpart. “Surrealism,” he says, “that is the movementof ‘surrealism’ which has spread from France, cannot, in its original form,
completely match the situation in our country. . . . Surreality is one of the76

universal values invoked by man’s desire” (qtd. in Durozoi 336).
More generative, however, is to read the outsider status of Takahashi
Shinkichi and René Daumal in terms of one another, primarily because
both Takahashi’s and Daumal’s poetry and poetics find their locus outside
Surrealism within “outsider” literary movements and parallel Eastern wisdom traditions (Dada and Zen Buddhism for Takahashi, and Simplism and
Hindu-yoga for Daumal). Furthermore, since both writers resist affiliation
with Surrealism and have had their poetry most aligned with it excluded
from major Surrealist anthologies, their outsider status invites a parallel
reading of the two on more equal terms as an enriching force exertingpressure upon Surrealism from the outside to remain closer to the hermetic traditions that give rise to, and present a rich theoretical framework
for, the revolution of consciousness that Surrealism proposes.
*
A young woman visited me from the North Pole on a single-wheeledvehicle, taking only 1.22 seconds.
She said she hated the bourgeoisie.
The mere word capital made her tremble.
She said she had brought a magnet which converts gold, silver, nickel,
and platinum to saliva in seconds. And she taught me an incantationand how to chant it.
Any time you think you need it — she said.
A Dadaist said she was a phosphoric pronunciation.

A younger contemporary of André Breton and the Surrealists, René
Daumal was a principal member of the Simplists, a literary fellowship offour formed in 1922 (that later grew in size), which included Roger GilbertLecomte, Robert Meyrat, and Roger Vailland, all of whom experimented
with “the waking dream” by exploring astral projection, extra-retinal
vision, lucid dreaming, automatic writing, and drug use, some of which(such as inhaling ether and carbon tetrachloride) was an attempt to draw
ever closer to the death state in order to discover hidden elements of thesubconscious — activities that paralleled those of the Surrealists, with one
marked distinction, the exploration of consciousness near the death state.
The Simplists published three issues of a literary journal, Le Grand Jeu(“The Big Game”) — eventually calling themselves by the same name — acounter force to Surrealism that acted paradoxically (as nearly everything in
Daumal’s Hindu-influenced universe), as an unspoken ally in the quest to77

revolutionize consciousness and as a simultaneous departure in achieving
it. To consolidate power, Breton invited Daumal to join the Surrealists, but
Daumal, with characteristic panache and a fierce loyalty to Hindu teachings (he was an extraordinary scholar of Hinduism and Hindu poetics, andtaught himself to read Sanskrit in his teens), declined. Through a series ofopen animosities, both sides mounted piercing critiques, Daumal’s mostmemorable being “Open Letter to André Breton,” published in 1930 in
Le Grand Jeu:
And in the area of positive research, what have you done since the founding of Surrealism? . . . We [Le Grand Jeu] have . . . the unlimited field (inevery conceivable mental direction) of Hindu yoga, the systematic confrontation of the lyrical and dreamlike fact with the teachings of occult
tradition . . . and those of the so-called primitive mind . . . and we’re notfinished yet. (The Powers of the Word 53)

Like Daumal and Le Grand Jeu, Takahashi identified himself in nonSurrealist terms, exerting a powerful, yet in his case tacit, pressure fromoutside the Surrealist circle. Born in 1901 in a small fishing village on
Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four largest islands, Takahashi had a difficult youth, which included a disastrous stay in Tokyo that forced him to
return penniless to his village, until he encountered a newspaper article on
Dadaism and returned to Tokyo with renewed enthusiasm. He distributed
a mimeographed collection of his poems in 1921 and a Dadaist manifesto(and poems) in 1922, followed by his first book, Dadaisuto Shinkichi no shi(Poems of Dadaist Shinkichi), in 1923, with the first copy handed to him
through the bars of a police cell (where his often impulsive actions had
landed him). Sensing he needed spiritual help, he began Zen training in
1928. After one week of intensive training with the great Rinzai masterShizan Ashikaga, he fell in a corridor unconscious, with “his mind,” ashis translator Lucien Stryk describes, completely “shattered” (2). He wassent home and locked in a tiny room for three years, continuing to write
poems. He fully recovered — emerging with even deeper realization of thecosmic Void — and unlike his literary counterparts, openly embraced Zen,completing a seventeen-year course of discipline and remaining true to
Zen tenets until his death in 1987.
The lines of distinction between Surrealism, Dadaism, and modernism inJapan in the 1920s and 1930s were blurry, certainly fluid, and the Japanesepoet placed less emphasis on those distinctions than did his or her Frenchcounterpart. In History of the Surrealist Movement, Gérard Durozoi notes,“ ‘Surrealism,’ for Japanese writers and artists, meant a mingled version of78

Dadaism and futurism, a ‘modern’ mentality that would above all enable
them to break with the realist or symbolist tradition” (335). The poetryof Takahashi — while self-proclaimed as Dadaist (as in his aptly titled
Poems of Dadaist Shinkichi ) — is an effortless movement between Dadaism,
Surrealism, and Zen, laying important groundwork for how Takahashi saw
his poetics. As Durozoi further notes, “The Japanese version of surrealism[was] capable of synthesizing the quest for the irrational through automatism, zen, and the feeling for nature developed in the classic haiku . . .”(336). With regard to this synthesis of psychic automatism and haiku,
Nishiwaki goes so far as to claim Basho as “a pioneer of Surrealism,” inhis 1961 article “Surrealism and Myself ” (qtd. in Keene 332), although heno doubt means this in the sense of Basho’s clear vision of psychic fluidity
and not in the more technical aspects of Surrealist language play.
Similar to Daumal’s first poetry collection, Le Contre-Ciel (The CounterHeaven), published in 1936 and containing fifty-nine poems extraordinarily Surrealist yet written under the banner of Simplism (and whose later“prose” section — “Keys to a Great Poetic Game” — reflects the tenets ofHinduism, particularly the form and structure of Patanjali’s epigrammatic
Yoga Sutras), Takahashi’s first collection, Poems of Dadaist Shinkichi (aswell as his later work), parallels the Surrealist reach of his contemporaries(through juxtapositions of distant realities, interpenetrations of landscapes,
and a quest for the marvelous) yet simultaneously distinguishes Takahashi’senterprise through his expression of Zen tenets. While Japanese Surrealism
was capable of accommodating the quest for the irrational with Buddhist
precepts, Zen tenets were rarely explicitly presented in the texts of suchmajor Surrealist figures as Nishiwaki and Takiguchi.4 Certainly, Nishiwaki
explored the Zen Buddhist concept of mu — nothingness, or the Void — inhis theoretical writings, linking it to concepts of “eternity” and to preceptsof Zen, as Miryam Sas has noted in Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese
Surrealism (122-24), but he did not embark on a concerted discipline of Zen
nor discuss Buddhist precepts explicitly in his poetry. Thus, like Daumal,
Takahashi’s adherence to disseminating the realizations of his meditative
practice distinguishes his work among his contemporaries and also exerts
a powerful challenge to the avant-garde — even tacitly, by its mere presence — to remain close to its hermetic (and in this case cultural) roots.
*79

DADA gives birth to all, splits and synthesizes all.
All is encamped behind DADA.
Nobody can be on the DADA’s side.
DADA is female, but, has no sexual cravings.
That is why DADA is equipped both with sex organs and all kinds of weapons.
DADA is the most cowardly creature. Since it keeps a furious fighting
spirit at its waist, it is in constant explosion, smashing and destroying.
All is enemy to DADA.
DADA curses everything to death, swallows everything up, and yet its
tongue, still dissatisfied, flicks in and out like an eternal have-not.

Takahashi poetically embodies his meditative practice, exerting a powerfulchallenge to the avant-garde, in a number of ways, two of which I want
to discuss: an exploration of death and its metaphorical extension, an
embrace of the Void.
First, as a good student of Zen, Takahashi understands the importance ofdissolving the ego — that is, killing the limited self in order to achieve thelimitless expanded Self. This is not unlike Daumal’s exploration of neardeath states, although Daumal and his fellow Simplists approached this on
physio-spiritual levels through such practices as inhaling ether and carbon
tetrachloride.5 For Takahashi, the avenue of exploration is Zen meditation,
through which the death of the self is experienced not as a nihilistic condition but one of release that enables unbounded perception, i.e. “enlightenment.” Death, then, becomes life: death of the ego, death of the individual
self, death of the subject position, and thus, death of subject/object duality. Zennists employ a variety of techniques to achieve this — from thepractice of watching the breath in meditation (that is, focusing on the mostintimate form of dualism the body exacts — the inhalation and exhalation),to the contemplation of koans (seeming nonsensical statements, such as“What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “What is your face before
your parents were born?” [emphasis added]).
Koan practice is designed less to discover an answer than to short-circuit
the rational hold on discourse and reorient the practitioner to the question,that is, to reorient the subject/object duality. “Possibly,” Ueda Makoto
argues in Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature, Takahashi “considers his poetry a kind of koan or a popularized version of a koan” (344).
This koan-like quality can be seen particularly in Takahashi’s middle andlater periods, perhaps most emblematically through one of Takahashi’s
poems from his middle period (translated by Ueda), “Death,” which consists solely of the title and just one epigrammatic line: “Nobody has everdied” (345). As with most koans, the language in such a poem is designed to80

move one toward a kind of silence, a Void of meditative awareness whererationality turns back on itself in eloquent, selfless dissolve.
Whatever the meditative method (contemplating koans, watching thebreath, practicing attention, and so on), the goal of the Zennist is to kill theindividual self by burning away the ego, or in the words of the title of oneof my favorite Takahashi poems, “Burning Oneself to Death.”
This remarkable poem (from his later period) about a monk self-immolating during the Vietnam War, is not only a powerful political statement
but also a metaphorical enactment of Takahashi’s poetic and meditative
practice. The poem begins: “That was the best moment of the monk’s
life. / Firm on a pile of firewood / With nothing more to say, hear, see, /Smoke wrapped him, his folded hands blazed” (29). The poem closes
with the monk physically burned up, dispersed into the environment. His
sense of individuality, however, is also metaphorically burned away, hiscore dispersed — as mystics describe — into “every particle of creation.”
Takahashi concludes: “. . . he was a mass / Of flame. Globes, one after
another, rolled out, / The delighted sparrows flew round like fireballs.”
That is, the monk is himself a ritual (“a mass”), and each particle of theburning monk is itself a tiny world (“Globes, one after another rolled out”)
now part of a larger cosmic flight (represented by the “delight” of the“sparrows”). As with Daumal, death — in Takahashi’s case, the death ofthe ego — reveals the true life of the imagination.
Such a death enables an immersion in the fullness of the Void (what mystics refer to as the vacuum-plenum paradox); thus, equally important is
Takahashi’s rendering of negation as a positive site of endless cosmic possibility. But what are the literary corollaries to this mystical Void? Nishiwaki
makes a link in his essay “The Extinction of Poetry,” telling us, “The most
expanded, the most advanced mode of poetry is that which is closest to its
own extinction” (20). He delves deeper into the Buddhist aspects of thisextinction in his 1959 essay “Poietes,” in which he sounds strikingly similar
to Pierre Reverdy. “The ultimate terrain of the poetic world,” Nishiwaki
argues, “consists of linking opposing elements and bringing them into harmony. That terrain is nothingness [mu]. The highest world of poetry is thisworld of nothing [mu]. . . . The study of Zen perhaps involves this poetics
of nothingness originating from Buddhism” (qtd. in Sas 124).6
For Takahashi, Dadaism, informed by Buddhism (and his decades’ exploration of mu), is not mere nihilism, thus moving beyond negation as aform of cultural and spiritual protest. Tzara himself marginally connects

81Dadaism and Buddhism at the 1922 Conférence sur Dada: “Dada isn’t at all
modern, it’s rather a return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference”(qtd. in Sas 122). Takahashi’s own reading of Tzara in this regard is also
informative: “Tzara’s manifesto should not be considered mere pessimism
or mere nihilism, but underlying it is a positive philosophy through which
man wishes to rise to his feet above the spiritual devastation” (qtd. in Ko,“A Comparison of Dada Manifestoes” 47).
However, Tzara never develops the connection between Dadaism andBuddhism, as Miryam Sas argues (122), nor, as I want to argue, does his
project ever fully realize the dynamic depths of “nothingness,” in a sense
keeping the Dadaist outside the systems against which he or she rebels. In
other words, in Tzara the subject/object duality persists and, ironically, gets
reinscribed: by shouting from the “outside” against a bankrupt system of
religious, philosophic, economic, and cultural beliefs, Western Dadaism insome ways deepens the dichotomy, affirming, ironically, that there is indeed
an inside and an outside to consciousness. Takahashi, however, embraces
a practice that itself calls for a new paradigm of the subject/object duality — something reciprocal that calls into question even the concepts of“inside” and “outside,” casting them as complementary rather than contradictory — and reorients the question of the subject/object duality so thatthe seer and the seen become one (a problem that has similarly plagued
the Western perspective, and a reorientation we see, for example, in the
poetry of a poet like Walt Whitman who describes, echoing Wordsworth,“There was a child went forth every day, / And the first object he looked
upon . . . that object he became” [138]). As noted Zen master D.T. Suzuki
describes this orientation, “The doctrine of sunyata [the Void] is neither animmanentism nor a transcendentalism. . . . ‘Knowing and seeing’ sunyata issunyata knowing and seeing itself : there is no outside knower or spectator;
it is its own knower and seer” (261-62).
Reading Takahashi as an “outsider” to Surrealism — so to speak — in asimilar position as, say, Daumal, presents possibilities for both Dada and
Surrealism in the new century, by perhaps also asking how his “outside”
vision shapes and is shaped by Surrealism’s “inside.” His Zen practice — inwhich the seer and seen become one — grants a generative way to reconstitute the project of Dada by reclaiming the Void of negation as, paradoxically, part of a fullness of being. Furthermore, although a self-proclaimed
Dadaist, Takahashi is often (as with Daumal) strikingly Surrealist, particularly in his middle and later, Zen-influenced poems, in which, as Ueda
notes, “[t]hey no longer show the explosive energy or the rebellious spiritthat dominated his dadaist poems; rather, in a reflective tone and restrained82style they try to activate the reader’s mind by way of surprise or irony”(344). However, Surrealism plays a key role even in his early Dada poems.
As Ko Won argues in Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan
Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi, and Their Fellow Poets,
The majority of Takahashi’s Dada poems deal with his view of reality,
and this view is crystallized by his way of penetrating into an interior surreality. Accordingly, the poet’s view of that surreality is an inner depth ofreality characterized by deformity, deformation, and decomposition ofbody and mind in connection with man’s condition. Thus, psychologicaland negative imageries predominate. (39)

By drawing upon Surrealist juxtapositions of distant realities, associative
leaping, and chthonic interpenetrations of physical and psychic landscapes(among a number of other common Surrealist techniques), Takahashi
recasts Dadaist negation and deformity, in the manner of a Zen koan,
short-circuiting rationality in order to grant access to the visionary —revealing, in other words, a Surrealist moment of the “marvelous.” As hetells us in his manifesto, “DADA gives birth to all, splits and synthesizes
all. / All is encamped behind DADA. / Nobody can be on the DADA’sside.” Similar to the primordial Void, DADA — according to Takahashi —is both the source of birth and destruction, an impersonal condition thatone “encamp[s] behind” yet cannot claim as one’s own. By examining theroots of Japanese Surrealism — nourished by the intermingling fluids ofSurrealism, Dada, and Zen — we approach a less-dichotomous renderingof literary and mystical experience, as well as open further possibilities for
Surrealism in the new century.

83

Notes

1. Indented quotations at the beginning of each section of this article arefrom Takahashi Shinkichi’s Dada manifesto, “Assertion is Dadaist,” translated by Ko Won and presented in its entirety in his article, “A Comparisonof Dada Manifestoes by Takahashi and Tzara,” pages 42-44.
2. Japanese names throughout this article are presented in the traditionalmanner, surname first.
3. Other important figures, most notably Kitasono Katue, are certainly
worth mentioning as instrumental in promoting Surrealism in Japan in the
1920s and 1930s.
4. In fact, Kitasono Katue, another prominent Japanese Surrealist to whom
I referred earlier, actually critiques Zen. He published an influential manifesto on visual “plastic poetry” in which he discussed his concept of “ideoplasty,” the result of language that is collected, arranged, and combinedin an attempt to create imagery. In it he explicitly criticizes Zen, probably,as John Solt conjectures, because he may have been disheartened because
the Japanese Imperial Navy appropriated Zen meditation during the Second World War as a means to keep sailors alert and to promote their keen
concentration for killing (291-92). At the same time, Solt acknowledges thecomplexity, arguing that Kitasono’s “attention to everyday objects, his creative use of blank space, and the elegant simplicity of his designs resonate
with the esthetic principles underlying such Zen-influenced arts as flower
arrangement, the tea ceremony, and calligraphy” (291).
5. Ironically, Daumal’s death from tuberculosis in 1944 at age thirty-six may
have been caused by his earlier experiments with the death state by inhaling the poisonous substance carbon tetrachloride. That is, in repeatedly
experimenting with the near death state, Daumal may have — in “practicing death,” so to speak — contributed to his early demise. Several scholars
have commented on this. See Rosenblatt, page 38.
6. This quality of “linking opposing elements” is echoed elsewhere in
Nishiwaki, as in his 1961 article “Surrealism and Myself,” in which he notes,“I came ultimately to the conviction that the lifeblood of poetry was whatfrom long ago has been called ‘unanticipated juxtaposition,’ or what Baudelaire referred to as surnaturalisme or ironie. In short, the important elements
in a poem are supernatural and surrealistic . . .” (qtd. in Keene 332).

84

Works Cited

Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen
R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972.
Breton, André and Philippe Soupault. The Magnetic Fields. Trans. David
Gascoyne. London: Atlas Press, 1985.
Daumal, René. Le Contre-Ciel. Trans. Kelton W. Knight. New York: The
Overlook Press, 1990.
_____. The Powers of the Word: Selected Essays and Notes 1927-1943. Trans. MarkPolizzotti. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1991.
Durozoi, Gérard. History of the Surrealist Movement. Trans. Alison Anderson.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature in the Modern Era.
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1984.
Ko, Won. Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi
Shinkichi, and Their Fellow Poets. New York: New York University Press, 1977.
_____. “A Comparison of Dada Manifestoes by Takahashi and Tzara.”
Dada/Surrealism 4 (1974): 42-49.
Nishiwaki, Junzaburo. “The Extinction of Poetry.” In The Poetry and Poetics
of Nishiwaki Junzaburo. Ed. Hosea Hirata. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993: 20-28.
Rosenblatt, Kathleen Ferrick. René Daumal: The Life and Work of a Mystic
Guide. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.
Sas, Miryam. Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1999.
Sato, Hiroaki, ed. and trans. Ten Japanese Poets. Hanover, NH: Granite
Publications, 1973.
Solt, John. Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning: The Poetry and Poetics of Kitasono
Katue (1902-1978). Cambridge: Harvard University Press (Harvard University Asia Center), 1999.
Stryk, Lucien. Introduction. Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems of Shinkichi
Takahashi. By Takahashi Shinkichi. Takahashi 1-15.
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki. Ed.
William Barrett. Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1956.
Takahashi, Shinkichi. Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi.
Trans. Lucien Stryk (with the assistance of Takashi Ikemoto). University
of Illinois Press, 1986.
Ueda, Makoto. Modern Japanese Poets and the Nature of Literature. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1983.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Ed. Malcom Cowley. Viking Press, 1959.
New York: Penguin Books, 1976.

85

JENNIFER LOWE & TIM RAMICK
Plus

Cock and level, failure and nickelback,monticelloing all the way to niagara,apalache to knickerbock, we plunged
into our union, summer children
into water, the whitest leaf, the+inadequate flow, tongued wrist hairin sunlight, cloud to cloud in theblack above, and before we burnt
across the delta we willowed our grief
Out of dazed fortune, we fell into riverbanks under an affluent sky, at home until circumspection
pulled me to separate, flew from siloed grain to fisted sea, our meeting preposterous in thefirst place. Her disapproving light shining on cloud bottoms, mother-tongue rained, prayedoh no. We played at nursing a diffused innocence, hard hearts and harder eyes, an ideal of old
combined with soft flesh and soft heads, the worst combination, taking a blinded vow tocome accustomed, swallow the condition of living as annexed limbs in each other’s garrets
where we should’ve respected souls. A single sustained squint at enmeshment before the fall,
pretending godhood returns evil and we collapse into our mall gait, passing elderly girls inpolyester and perfect white shoes. Water in a clear sky is believable; clouds attempt
disclosure and are therefore untrustworthy, as is the water in the well bottom, offering morewhen more lies shining in eyes of those who claim clear lust’s finite if not fertilizedwith indiscrimination and bad consciences. A cloud goes white to azure, beggars description.
crimson to gray as quickly as thepallor of a skewered soldier, andnow, in these days of terror, these
moments of poignant and inventive
violence, it might prove prudent toreconcile ourselves as unconnected,
as much a part of the world as a
welwitschia bush or borrowed party
dresses or unaroused painted cumulus.

86

Trigger and upheaval, achieve andveneer, freewaying halfway from thefour corners, tesuque to tucumcari, webottomed out our affair, august lovers
2
hitting dry shallows, the blackest petal,
the geyser’s choke, untouched ankle
retreating, hidden, star on star cloakedin broad daylight, before we boarded
the transatlantic we wrung faint hope
We could uncover ourselves out of desert, an ancient ocean floor too exposed, as vulnerable
as our bodies, chronicled from petroglyphs to monographs, our markings on our surfaces
scratched and stretched with desperation shrouded by blue-sky intensity, your reddest
arroyo resistant to my research, silken penetration and stiff concern, my inaccessible
bluff soporific and un yielding, genetic recombination a dream for those withmatchable loins, thus no surprise when we sparked secession: a union without the civil
potential of making some successful fetus. An outpatient event, then, our surgical coupling,
the slaying of rabbits not murder when preceded with frozen intent, the male, hevibrates, and the female, she waffles. Fire from last night’s ash as my throat upon your belly,
the innocence of your words as improbable as if I uncovered you in my pantry, forcing you toadmit it’s the little god’s heart after all that’s scorched us, white- washed with innuendo,
the collaboration stew goes hot to dead gray as abruptly as a negative orgasm after the handshake.
of your hair; later, then, in our age ofignorance, an era of assumption andhabit, the tedious administration of
blunt mediocre brutality, let’s admit
how complicit we are, the depth of ourdisgrace and national collusion, thus
involved, included as much as handshaped bread, a cupped breast, or amirror stained by lung-warmed breath.

87We brim with the wellwaters of
alluvial living, pond pigeons withbobbing thoughts, literate dunces
afraid of the darker darks, and thetangible you and the theoretical you
are equally falsified, nickelfront andabsolution, the cherry tree and theriver crossing toward our amalgam,
winter children sledding a slope, theSkiers’ legs lock into their steepest fright, the negligible melt, your hand bridging ice orrebuff to remind itself of nipples under forged cloth, star to brain, an arc or neural rut,from hot eye back again to star in the blue above. Then, the pierce, a slight insistence,
temperature’s sharp thaw to bolder clench, the coil assertion, what kind of friend would
say no, seeing the approach, death from afar and the near daily miss, what will emerge
as our breath’s eventual flat betrayal. Before I burst through the graveyard gate, I want it set
down: one drunk night on a levee we leaked our sex into wet creek-flooded earth tosettle seasons later, silt on the upholstery. You splintered me into agreement, refusal too awry,
contrary to ecliptic. I spite chastity, abstinent land of liberty, fit only for tearful senators;
with you I rage, recover that syncopated travesty, out of site of mind-merchants seeking toflog the three keys to unlock trinity, and we codger meaning out of dual, with or without offspring, some spun filament of fractal fluff, ingrown harmony. Are we sufficient enough.
Should I conjure a male daughter tocourt your female son, let them belovers, let them household in forgiven
sunlight and the fairer breezes,
let their dowry be consecutive
3
nights of sensual living, consecutive
days of consensual disregard, theburning of graven imaginings or thetight sublimity of held water.

88

Cunt and ineluctable, a close adherence
to what won’t be, what we’re saved orpreserved from by tight fabrication, so
go ahead and press my vocabulary into
your service, if you don’t mind
employing accurate pronouns. Some
admit dull sublimation and some
prefer it, prize a numb dispossessed
touch over none at all; or any. I use the
Clutch and grown, I grant possessive freely, cast paean to nouns circumcised with your verbs,
we castrate and trade what we love: rivers and angles and babies, the nearest shore, our skiff
clean woven and airy with linen and sieves. Taken as a whole you sink in the fresher waters,
a fluid skilled sky unable to manifest a flocking genius, able to drown the full feminine
thirst, vaguely unwilling to puzzle each consonant into its ordered spooned position behind
its chosen vowel, your twice place and do you ever give up. Ever let yourself off the hook.
And so we watch while sentences slither into henids, melt into models of selected lives.
I drop a rag upon your limpid puddles and cease an attempt at cleansing my thoughts.
You’ll never know my and meaning, let a moist bridal lassitude swoon you into solitude,
you’ll grab the verge to mark who you are when not propelled by swift self-titillation.
My doubt insists, I try to rearrange it elsewhere, as once on a white November beach we
wrestled our love into copper-blue late morning lightly dusted misapprehension.
ornamented with a distant high tossingof branches of trees, you accepted theireffortless navigation, separate andaligned, we cohere and seek, pursue
and evade, each leaf obeys its
4neighbor’s behavior, no one is leading
as they, held in stasis, embody stability
to contrast with reactive, yield a circularrooted beauty elsewhere unknown.

89Columnar and resurrected, liver andlights, why might we not find ourselvesencased in other bodies later. For now
just notice my brand briefly, avoid
5
comment, please slave away silent at
my side, untraduced by tradition, that
dislocated place where we steal and lie,
are not entwined, and cheat somehours from the mouths of endings.
Blank your fortune to digest Death, always to be, and no one ceases to bubble in their selfish joy.
Reap your greenest pleasures through the night, it’s when morning bellyache makes you spew
your expectations and regret comes we loose our grip and give in to the ripped contract. We will
now sacrifice our work to the outdrawn tide. Shells and skeletal blades behead our favorite
effigy, the fossils of authentic cartilage left behind, a fisherman’s ideal catch become tall tale,
we eulogize the barracuda’s discards, the shark’s slit throat. And what becomes of discontent
and what of gratitude and what of content. And what of vice. I voice my lust for yourstrewings and I formally demand a fictive principled remain, preserved in saliva, wrapped inwool, and forgive me if I insist on some surge of perfume to stir the masculine story,
aggress and chapter memory, ineradicate the way I waste my prime, invalidate cause and effectand billet poke the billet-doux, an ambergris of spent minds, lingered over and loved into blue-balls;
until you extract the freshest musk of bonily brought-together deer men, I offer my sure sac.
constants. And what of indivisibility.
And what of merge. Am but a small
contusion, a shaving nick that will
have healed before you notice. You canfall and not break. I don’t need much,
won’t take much, when my back isagainst a tree trunk I can stand to lean,look up, can almost bear it, swim headfirst into those wild pointless stars.

90

Clit and skill, a triumph of ripplingcluelessness made sufferable throughmuffled laughter, acknowledgement
we’d each do better on our own, my
apt fingers more precise to find the6pulse, your palm purposive and brisk,
yet where’s the game in that, nointersection aches to blend effortlessly.
We should be frictive, an uneven sit or
When asked if you wished to ride, initial disparity and awkward fit, you withdrew your faithfrom my good palm, asking could a cat purr with nothing to curious itself about, withno uncraven mass to ever knead, some contrast of texture or failure of mystery, therequited frontal attack of syntax, frowningly unsuited diction to loosen lips, to totem ouroaths as created dread to overcome, separate hurdles, an escapade that ends notwith spasms but with armwrestling, preliminary, to establish real roles, to determine
who feints, who counters, who initiates, ascends, defends, concedes; we know, you and I, in
the rush of morning, who breaches, who receives. A flock of petals are spooked fromyour daisy, a delta of birds steers without pilot; instinctively twisting away from celibate
rifles, just as impassioned guideless salmon don’t collide. Each of our fingertips will
bourbon one another’s spines, attuned to the increment of blank measures, the soundlessscore, a mute pageant before, behind, beside its outline. Do you, if asked, want to ride.
Planless to sense our way throughbrambled dark, sniff by sniff. If, then. If
not, then. Insistence as much a skill as
listening. Which we also watch for,earn: the beloved exalt and brooded,
your flushed unthought response.
That’s ripe, and so fitting it hurts, so
wet it must have taken decades toperfect, unlearn, then slide in return.

91

To the pavement fallen I’ll cup yourbreast, the smaller of the two; I held
it like a clock holds noon. Then not
at all, neither in the now nor the pew
nor the subjunctive never, lullaby ona slab, nippled to last. I will breakwithout falling, your light has
shattered my private freeze. One
drunk night on an imaginary levee
Hankering to ride, timidity couldn’t kill the story, couldn’t stiff my will through resistant silk
tissue just to spark or spring the kid, all primes wasted in false multiples. As you only guessat my meaning; others hazard division. And what of isolation. And your furtive uncertainty, illdisguised: plain flak to ask what of specious blood drawn to fill a socket. I can teem intaglio,cup to mouth, rainflood a shot glass for future thirst. You need decanting, need to risk a line
break, clotted around with more than you want and your glance unseals you, embossed andfreaked with genius. Retreat into an interior firmament won’t amend the botch. This curls
protected, secret to we who excuse your knotted position. Bend backward or avert, finicky
reckoning of who owes who to the penny, gush into the maw, we will be indebted anyway. No
door out of the sanctum. You aren’t sufficient enough or fully witnessed, but detumesce
pronto before math class is dismissed. I bake square cakes you frost and ignore, speculate apink country where stories soften into pillows, bird-egg into hinged wing, eye into calyx.
ovals you protect in your cheeks.
Given one split blink alone with you
in your dreams I’ll kaleidoscope yourdread, awkward refusal smoothed
into sinuous spectrum. You’re indigo
7
bleeding into black and your black
couldn’t noir an overcoated eunuch,
couldn’t darken my windowlesstheater on a bleak winter’s midnight.

92

Come and target, articulation of asudden heart, why might we not lose
ourselves enwrapt in other bodies
sooner. Make rhythm melody, wipe
the construct clean. You husband
your hush, the silented shavings ofwaves broken upon your planed andsanded shore, the moistened board
warped toward landlocked horizon.
Almost out of dirty words. The debris field of my crash extends past your border, silver wakeof detritus, its nuclear glow from phosphorescent surf to green plankton which silent
assault a throne, lap at your lifeguard tower. Shark my scuttled fathoms, pull raw femurs
protesting, gnawed from the preserver. And what of form. And don’t talk to me of husbands,
none mans my perimeter, so what of commendations. Am but widow who’s left to noticeas every night (tattered lunar driftwood courage and knotholed cloud-rags) one more lambgoes missing. The fox thieves insight that pales under canon stare. Unprotected from herself.
Homologous thus less desolate. We will wash one another’s feet in the text of seafoam at dawn,
lave bonds to purity, asperge death chambers of collaborative folly, rinse cuttlefish-inked fingers
clear, redeem profanity, place plea bargains side by side to the cop-extorted confession. You
are of course free to ignore killing rooms, our palms stained with verbiage; you can covervellum with sepia refusal, spite the language of small creatures, our spines patient, innocent, true.
sensuality mashed into porridge, ourif thens irrevocably not thens, thebrooded responses puppied in hosefilled buckets, our exaltations
reserved for better crowds, sweet8
benefactors with powder in theireyes. You flower my ears withmeadow whispers; I’ll pound yourvelum with the plastercasts of idiots.

93

From the closet floor risen weaving I’dpierce your mouth, more cleft thanmine, permeate it the way an isthmus
soaks shoreline with liquid salt. It
9seems you’re afraid of nothing, as longas it’s not real. An oval hurt or
unfillable mourn not unfamiliar tome either. How did I know — becauseminus the crossbar, crucifixless, you
The weaker you should never deviate from vertical, tilt drastic as an imaginary windmill in rounddefense of sister turret and uneasy campanile. Gravity kindly takes care of everything.
A bowl of winter oranges marks the place: your beloved, my new friend, not as ardent
as my old friend whose cherrywood desk with its burls and cluttered drawers bears understory, refuses to cross the grain. The remainder of two take s time to finagle, wattage
stored for storm, the thrown away one isn’t me, not nearly sober ed by your chill doubts.
You’re the infidel, not spare enough for anything more perplexing than infidelity, truer than
towhead but less fancied than the comfort of a keyhole, familiar to those known for theirrent hearts, pitying her hollow unpunctured, unimpaled, not spoken of as a moist home,
all misery is honorably requited. It’s getting so I can’t say taut without impugning myself,hung with anxious spurt or throb, it’s getting so I can’t sleep. Call him your saviour.
Call her your goddess. Nearly drained of blasphemy, let’s pull the plug on our paper lung.
out all the antecedents, downshift
around corners full throttle, I to you inseconds. Left to her own devices she’d
type carbons and paste stamps and lickeditors for him. She may be darker
than he safely realizes, she may be
eclipsed or blatantly witchy, she may
be numberless degrees past pitch andunable to gyroscope sunwise into hue.

94

Clench and insistence, right or left
handed or brained, awkward or
centripetal, relief makes disbelieving
eyes at refusal, this is complemen10
tarity. Her bilocated tongue chases orgilds another aperture, his unprickedindentation a niche out of danger. Red
wine tastes of ashes or cobwebs or wet
mice, she’s not nearly drunk enough toEvery blunt ingrate wants to have an excuse. We breathe and fondle poison as if immunity
is blown through air with what we love, in case you were seeking my sanction. We
crave experience over wondering; we revere it. After an asphyxiation, the good ovengas and the purgatorial awakening, prematurely dizzy, she remembers his skin, histaste, but murky nostalgia forsakes, breaks for it, goes with projection to the killing bed.
His wind chime seeks whoever’s got the jingle. Steadfast he could only pray to be. Now,
as their bundled child sleeps alertly, holding down one place in the booked chambers, shepresses the triggers one at a time. Accepts renouncing as part of her Medea and vaginal
inflation, the dear levelling of rectitude, house of virtuous pagans. Southpawed for purpose,he ransacks her attic. Grows intimate with tides of renewal and diary justice. Devotion
soon speeds him to vista and resurgence. While she: feeds off token laureate, timbers
the upper forests of nobler unmet need, converts rejection to high treason, solitary confinement.
pitch, ravels luxuriant coloratura toaccompany her on the weekly
commute to the underworld. It’s his
remorse incriminates him, his
reluctance, protest. His own vociferous
trepidation. If she had a baby would
this all cease. Can she unconflate
Paris and penis. Is it enough or evenpossible to have an articulate heart.

95Arch and reach, contract and lift, thefantastical repose of struggle soon
over, release shifted to excuse, blame
delivered to curled toes. You soughtme atop the drudge hill not for touch
but for the poise and affirmation ofeffort, stale memory of wreaths andcloud chatter bound for sluice. I
granted what was requested, equals
She’s smart, a little lost, stays just distant enough on the parquet squares, each coterminous
with itself, to dance across the floor, hair washed to resemble care, tousled to simulate fondness,towheads turned bad leave no cigarette unsmoked. And what of it. I’ll light up later with mywound safely retracted, that’s what. There will be no pure conjoined inhale, mingled smoke withbreath; the dovetail cannot square for us, no consummation of ill will, no curse called down, nogold glue-gown, no bonfired curiosity, no tongue to salty bead ed tear. No more insinuation,
veiled allusion, only brain’s infusion; flesh within flesh long gone over. Give me leave to preferincorporeity, a ciphered kiss to the fronds of mind. We fail the patissière deity, crusts stiffen
to crullers twisted by you, my maker of double-helixes with every dawn, constellated archetypeof unadulterated bliss: e.g., one of our sweaty stampings. You think you need five languages
to be virile. Just like her you need plenty, so you take elsewhere; she knows to make her own.
Consecrate a cut wand when you strip the tree of its bark. She gets it. Furls dark and caved.
caught him unaware in the stacks andhe found refuge beside the chosen,
the coveralled beauty with theplucked bloom in her hammer loop. I
11
won’t say you when I know it ishim, grunt slamming that dishwashedwoman to the entry wall because hehas no patience for soft landings, forpoetic heroines, for fresh muffins.

96Out of all our impossibility surges
forgiveness, the truer love, thegentrified black widow domesticatedwith the end of a broom handle. Twomore lambs gone missing, one morenotion unfulfilled, twelve posts paled
in a snowstorm, fenced with a yawn
at the uptown pawn shop. She isdarker than he could have imagined,
Shimmers infrared, invisible, her bulb stolen for scientific angling, depth-blind creatures numbto spawn will not perform for calibrations of sight; she has been fathered by the pulse of
yearning’s swollen guitar, mothered and othered into shadow y comfort by melody’s arc,
looking on collectedly amidst frenzy. This won’t matter in some novels; in others it’s the entire
plot, resolved never or in a gauzy by and by. The profane finds to ride was exactly what it
wanted, exults and gloats, its salvation not in intent but in no beard stubble laid along
a disembodied ankle. Instead shared élan, all crossroads of the devil where he harvests
your soul in exchange for collusion, the collision of ideas as if harmony’s worth hellfire,
the slick glide of inklings as if they were fluids. What of pungent enantiodromia, a flip fromhyperbole to subtler, wider gifts. What of solid loss. The hours riven empty. I couldn’t not
make this. Notched puzzles of covert crenature are ending, the occult ultraviolet dissipates,
an immaterial conceit’s dull bells have sounded, the tower meets the road to sum what we did.
the sea. She seeks herself in herself,
not in him, not in any he, she is
her fiercely intelligent dildo, reflexive
and aglow. Left to his own devices
12
he’d organize her life’s droppings andsecretions, lower a tear to her image
and redden her lips with the blood
he’d punctured loose. Men andwomen add themselves to death.

97Contributors

Hinako Abe 阿部 日奈子 was born in 1953 in Tokyo. In 1983, while working as
a proofreader, she started writing poetry on the side. Her first book,『植民市の地形』Topography of a Colonial City (Shichigatsudo, 1989), received the Rekitei New
Poets Prize. Other collections include『典雅ないきどおり』Graceful Indignance (Shoshi
Yamada, 1994) and 『海曜日の女たち』 Women on Seaday (Shoshi Yamada, 2001),
which received the Takami Jun Prize.
Jeffrey Angles was born in Ohio in 1971 and earned his doctorate in modern
Japanese literature in 2004. He is currently head of the Japanese language programat Western Michigan University. His translations have appeared in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature, Critical Asian Studies, Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction
Quarterly, and numerous other journals. His book-length collection of translationsof Tada Chimako, From a Woman of a Distant Land, is forthcoming from Green
Integer Press.
Robert Quillen Camp creates interdisciplinary performance works that combine
sound, music, installation, and theater. His plays and other texts are in recent issuesof Conjunctions, Chain, Conundrum, and Play: A Journal of Plays. He is the founder anddirector of the Dodeska Performance Ensemble (www.dodeska.com).
Jill Darling writes poetry and essays and has had work published in journals including Bombay Gin, Phoebe, Aufgabe, Poets and Poems, and Quarter After Eight. She lives andworks in Michigan and Connecticut.
Akiko Fujiwara 藤原 安紀子 was born in Kyoto Prefecture in 1974. After graduating with a degree in Photography from the Osaka University of the Arts, she began focusing on writing poetry. In 2001, she received the prestigious annual poetry
award from Gendaishi Techō, a major poetry journal in Japan. Since then, her work
has appeared regularly in this and other journals. Her first book of poetry,『音づれる聲』(Otozureru Koe), was published by Shoshi Yamada in 2005.
Toshiko Hirata 平田 俊子 (b. 1955) received the Gendaishi Shinjinshō (New Faces
in Modern Poetry Prize) in 1984, leading to the publication of her first book,『ラッキョウの恩返し』Repayment of the Shallots, which has been translated into English
for The New Poetry of Japan anthology (Katydid, 1993). She is the author of over ten
books of poetry, including『ターミナル』Terminal, which received the Bansui Prizein 1997, fiction 『ピア(ノ・サンド』Piano Sandwich ), essays, and award-winning plays『開運ラジオ』(
Good-luck Radio ). Her most recent publications include『詩七日』(ShiNanoka) from Shoshi Yamada in 2004, which received the Hagiwara Sakutarō prize,99

as well as a book of fiction,『二人乗り』(Futari-Nori). Her work has been translated
and anthologized in English, Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Russian.
Brenda Iijima’s poetry and essays have recently appeared in Call: A Review, Fulcrum,
and The Brooklyn Rail. Around Sea was published by O Books in 2004 as were two
chapbooks, Color and its Antecedents (Yen Agat) and Early Linoleum (Furniture Press).
Animate & Inanimate Aims is forthcoming from Litmus Press. She is the publisherof Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs in Brooklyn, New York.
George Kalamaras is the author of five books of poetry and prose poetry, threeof which are full-length, and the most recent of which is Even the Java Sparrows CallYour Hair (Quale Press, 2004). Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue
University Fort Wayne, Kalamaras is the recipient of creative writing fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts (1993) and the Indiana Arts Commission (2001), as well as first prize in the 1998 Abiko Quarterly International Poetry
Prize (Japan) for two prose poems based on the lives of Yoshioka Minoru andOguma Hideo.
Eiichi Kasuya 粕谷 栄市 , born in Kogashi, Japan in 1934, writes only prose poems
and has been Japan’s leading prose poet since the publication of『世界の構造』TheStructure of the World (Shigakusha, 1971). His most recent books of poetry include『転落』(Tenraku) from Shichōsha, and『鄙唄』(Hinauta) from Shoshi Yamada, bothin 2004.
Conan Kelly lives in Providence, Rhode Island. A painter by training and an IT professional by trade, this is his first published work. These things happen over dinner.
Susan Landers is the author of 128 mgs., a panic picnic (O Books, 2003), and co-editor of Pom2. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Jennifer Lowe lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works as the film critic
for the Santa Fe Reporter (www.sfreporter.com). She has recently completed the jezebel
elegies and House.; poems from House. appear in current issues of Chicago Review andSalamander, while previous work has been published in AGNI, American Scholar, Gertrude, Harvard Review, Denver Quarterly, and Poetry Daily (www.poems.com).
Malinda Markham’s first book, Ninety-five Nights of Listening, received a BakelessAward and was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002. Recently, her work has been
published or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, Fence, Jubilat, American Letters & Commentary, and 3rd bed. She recently returned from spending four years in Tokyo, where
she worked as a full-time university instructor and then was a Blakemore Language
Grant recipient. Her literary translations and an essay on translating from Japanese
have appeared in the Antioch Review. She currently lives and works in San Francisco.
Sawako Nakayasu is slowly writing an insect-based book. Her publications include
Nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she, (forthcoming from Quale Press,
2005), So we have been given time Or, (Verse, 2004) and Clutch (Tinfish, 2002).

100

Naoko Nishimoto 西元 直子 was born in 1956 in Kagoshima, Japan. In 1998 she
published the book『ことり』Bird, in collaboration with the painter Yuji Akatsuka(Edition Works, 1998).『けもの王』Animal King, a collection of poetry, was published by Shoshi Yamada in 2002. In 2004, her work was featured in「おかえり」
Welcome Home, a collective exhibition of poetry at Pepper’s Loft Gallery in Tokyo,
along with seven other poets.
Chōrui Ogasawara 小笠原 鳥類 , born in 1977. Raised near the ocean. Once hadtropical fish as pets, and since then, a continuing interest in sea creatures. Waschased by dogs as a child, and now harbors a continuing fear of dogs. Also enjoyedperusing illustrated reference books. First inspired to write poetry after reading thefrog poems of Kusano Shimpei. Seriously began writing poetry around 1994; mostpoems written since then tend to involve animals and animal-related vocabulary,attempting to express an appreciation for animals through a dynamic use of words.
In 1999 received the Gendaishi Techō Prize, and in 2004 published『素晴らしい
海岸生物の観察』Observation of Fantastic Coastal Organisms with Shichōsha, receiving
the Rekitei New Poets Prize. Currently contributes poetry and poetry criticism tonumerous journals, including 「現代詩手帖」(Gendaishi Techō), 「歴程」(Rekitei ),「ＧＡＮＹＭＥＤＥ」,「分裂機械」( Bunretsu Kikai ) and「鐘楼」(Shōrō).
Sally Oswald is the 2005 Playwright-in-Residence at the Flea Theatre in New York.
Her plays have been developed and produced at theaters in New York, Providence,
and Philadelphia. She is the co-editor with Jordan Harrison of Play: A Journal Of
Plays (www.playjournal.com).
Tim Ramick lives with his spouse and son in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where hecurrently works as a library clerk for the Santa Fe Institute (www.santafe.edu). He
has recently completed One Ones One and Pursuance, which, along with previous work
and works in progress (including Saint Timothy), can be seen at www.timramick.net.
Eric Selland is a poet and translator living just south of San Francisco. His translations of contemporary Japanese poets appear in a variety of anthologies, as well ason the Internet. He has also published articles on Japanese Modernist poetry andtranslation theory. He is the author of The Condition of Music (Sink Press, 2000), andhas work in a Copper Canyon Press anthology of Asian literary translation.
Stacy Szymaszek’s Emptied of All Ships was just released by Litmus Press. She is theProgram Coordinator at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.
Jen Tynes lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and edits horse less press. Her work
has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Jubilat, TYPO, GutCult, Indiana Review,and H_NGM_N.
Dana Ward is the author of the chapbooks I Didn’t Built This Machine (Boog City,
2004), and Standards (Sea.Lamb.Press, 2004). Recent work is out or forthcoming in
6x6, The Tiny, Bird Dog, and elsewhere. He lives in Cincinnati, and edits Cy Press.

101

D.W. Wright is close to finishing a book of Kasuya Eichii’s poems in English
translation.
Minoru Yoshioka 吉岡 実 (1919-1990) published his first book of poems,『静物』
Seibutsu, in 1955 at the age of 36. Despite his late start in publishing, and his lackof any formal education (rare for a Japanese poet), he soon became a major figurein the avant-garde and is now considered one of Japan’s most important postwar
poets. His influence reached into other genres through his close friendships withmajor figures in contemporary Japanese painting and dance. Kusudama may be Yoshioka’s most important work, and is representative of his later experiments withquotation and collage.

102

Acknowledgements, Production Notes, Additional
Information

The following have previously appeared in other publications:
Hinako Abe: 「クマツヅラの薫り」: 『典雅ないきどおり』 (書肆山田 1994)
Eiichi Kasuya:「漂流記」: 『世界の構造』(詩学社);「満月」:『副身』
Toshiko Hirata:「ひとときの人」: 『夜ごとふとる女』(思潮社 1991)
Chōrui Ogasawara:「解析《犬》健康カルシウム人間」:『素晴らしい海岸生物の観察』（思潮社 2004）

Naoko Nishimoto:「木のなかで」:『けもの王』(書肆山田 2002);「あまくいろ濃く」: firstprinted on business cards for the「おかえり」Exhibition, 2004.
Minoru Yoshioka:『静物』: (Self-published, 1955). Translations by Eric Selland werefirst published in Moving Letters No. 2, 1983. Also, parts of Hiraide Takashi’s
For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (published in Three Factorial ) translated by Eric
Selland were first published in a past edition of Moving Letters).

Production Notes:
Sally Oswald:
The Painful Adventures uses diagrams and headings from Nicola Sabbattini’s
Manual for Constructing Theatrical Scenes and Machines, 1638. These texts are part ofa multimedia performance that has been developed in New York at Dixon Place,
Little Theater at Tonic, and St. Ann’s Warehouse Puppet Lab. Excerpts have been
published in Play: A Journal of Plays and are forthcoming in Encyclopedia.

Additional Information:
Susan Landers: Notes for “Giants” translation:
My translations of cantos from the Inferno are not true. I say that becausea) I don’t know Italian, and b) the cantos were created through the deliberately
haphazard use of a variety of translation methods and techniques (e.g., Web-basedtranslators, Italian/English dictionaries, homolinguistic translations of English
translations, writing-through exercises, etc.).
But this doesn’t mean they are false translations, either. I say that because my103

intent, by and large, was to capture either a) the plotline of any particular canto,or b) the spirit of that narrative made manifest through a particular formal quality
or structure.
This project began as a way to better understand the Inferno: writing as a formof reading. In doing so, the deftness of Dante’s construction became overwhelmingly clear: every word had been carefully chosen and positioned to best support
the architecture and morality of his universe. I couldn’t help myself from fucking
with that.
The giants of this canto represent desire without restraint, brute force, andpride. In effect, superpowers. I rewrote this canto by transcribing an English version backwards, and then editing it, all the while thinking of Opal Whitely in whose
writing wonder and terror collide. In doing so, my canto mimics the upheaval of
the natural order of things, which was the giants’ crime (i.e., attacking a god), andsimultaneously undermines the very notion of a natural order of things by embracing nonsensical grammar and narrative.
E-mail from Eric Selland to Sawako Nakayasu:. . . I’m not sure if I mentioned that Still Life was published in 1955 when
Yoshioka was nearly 40 years old and served as his introduction to the poetry world(though he had already published Liquid ). Yoshioka’s late start is in part due to themany years he spent in Siberia as a prisoner of war after having served in Manchuria, finally repatriated in a prisoner exchange with the Soviet Union (100,000
Japanese prisoners of the Soviets remain unaccounted for to this day). Yoshioka
returned to a Tokyo that was totally destroyed in the war. His entire immediate family died in the Tokyo fire bombings. One is reminded of a line in Kusudama whichreads “The ash-colored land”. . . So in a sense, the poets were his family. He formeda group called Wani (crocodile) with Ōoka Makoto and Iijima Kōichi, interested inexperimental poetry. Yoshioka had been reading Horiguchi Daigaku’s translationsof Rimbaud at the time he was drafted in the Imperial Army (all foreign literature
was banned at this time).
On names:
Japanese people generally list their last names first. In the translation section of this book, names are listed western style, first name first. However, in theJapanese section, the romanized names are listed with last names first. In the essayby George Kalamaras, names are mentioned in the manner in which they are mostcommonly used (and are thus inconsistent at times), but on the citations page, allauthors are listed with their last names first. Names in the Contributor’s Notes section are all listed first name first.
It is not uncommon for Japanese poets to use pennames for publishing,often using variations or modifications to their given names. One such example is
Chōrui Ogasawara: Chōrui is written 鳥類, which means birds, or kinds of birds.
Ogasawara is most likely his real last name.

This issue is dedicated in memory of Kaoru Kobayashi and Haruhiko Nakayasu.

104