43 The spider is genius. The celerity which moves — leading the air mass — the atmosphere level that falls higher than the clouds connecting the seasons. The spider is genius. The brilliance descending omnidirectionally is not a gravity-evading parachute, but striates the entire sky, guiding drops of light towards the ground. And it just lowers itself down along the way. How can there be such transparent bones — bones that flood over, even as they break. And plus he is a seed. With endurance and imagination as nourishment, the scheme is rather null. Sorcery is rather null. A light-handed evil which admits no glory, not even your own. The spider is simply genius. ______________________________________________________________________ Takashi Hiraide was born in Moji, Kitakyushu-shi in 1950. He has published numerous books of poetry as well as several books of genre-bending essays, including one on poetics and baseball. He is a prof. of [...]
Martin Rock
3 Poems from “62 Sonnets” (1953) 30 I won’t let words rest. At times they feel ashamed of themselves and want to die, inside of me. When that happens I’m in love. In a world otherwise silent people—only people— chatter away. What’s more, sun and trees and clouds are unconscious of their beauty. A fast-flying plane flies in the shape of human passion. Though the blue sky pretends to be a backdrop, in fact there’s nothing there. When I call out, in a small voice, the world doesn’t answer. My words are no different from those of the birds. 54 I grew unwittingly apart from the world in which I was born and can no longer walk again among the things of the earth. We know that even love is a possession, but we can’t keep from praying that life will go on. And we accept the poverty of our [...]
Secrets of the Garden of a Vacant House Seen in a Dream (translated by Hiroaki Sato) Things planted in the garden of a vacant house are _______pine trees and such loquat trees___peach trees___black pine trees___sasanquas _______cherries___and such prosperous leafy trees___branches of leafy trees that _______spread around as well under the leaves of those swarming branches _______the plants that luxuriate continuously all in all___ferns___bracken___fiddleheads___sundews___and _______such all over the ground they pile up and crawl the life of these blue things the garden of the vacant house is always in the plants’ _______shadows and dim only what faintly flows is a streak of rivulet water the sound of the running water soughing sadly and _______low day and night as well somewhere neat the soggy fence I see the uncanny muculent forms of slugs___snakes _______frogs___lizards___and such. And above this secluded world pale moonlight illuminates the night moonlight flows in mostly through the planted [...]
Thin Kimono is a book of mistaken identities: a hallucinogenic wandering through a cocktail party the night before the invention of the internet. The party is populated with individuals you may or may not know. Your wife is a slightly altered version of herself. There are horses, but even they have become something else. Michael Earl Craig’s acupuncturist is here too. She tells us her “speakers are hidden in the jade plant” (The Bad Clown) We get the sense she is struggling not to become evil. We know there must be separate rooms, separate poem-rooms, but even with titles, often the only sense of demarcation comes from the turning of pages. This is particularly true in the book’s second and smallest section, which is reminiscent of Matthew Rohrer’s “A Plate of Chicken” in that the section is comprised of short 8-line segments separated by asterisks (“A Plate of Chicken” is [...]