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Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context
Issue 12 January 2006 |
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translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles The Rose Tree [1] My heroic lover! You are a rose A slightly pale rose, aromatic with sex I kneel prostrate before you Your thighs, which my trembling arms embrace, Are a rose Nearby my closed eyes Is a clump of grass full of scent And in it, an infant rose damp with dew Sleeps the slumber of dawn I cling to you like a Greek supplicant While above me Your fingers open entranced Your jaw turns upward At some point You have become a brawny rose bush With leaves eating away the sun Him [2] A rustling pear tree — It spreads before me as I stand unmoving An expanding night — No trees to stand, no creatures to crawl the earth The undulating ground continues onward Until it embraces the ruined, anguished sky There in the sky That spot at the end of the earth, I see it — an invisible prison Thick iron bars, inside, an upturned chin Slightly parted lips sighing sweet breath Eyelashes curving upward An enraptured thinker Encircled with a heavy chain of flowers Is the figure seated on the Simple wooden chair suffering? Is he intoxicated? — Legs crossed An inverted tree of blood vessels Runs over his wide, bare chest, The weight of another earth Rests upon his shoulders While on his cylindrical arms With angrily swollen veins A yellow parrot gnaws at his raw flesh This invisible prison on the horizon This enchanted, suffering man inside the bars — What should I do to reach him? That forest of aromatic hair That shining pillar, that sun of darkness Those dark thighs under the boxing shorts Sunken in between, a pale lily What should I do To kneel at the base of This man's grandeur and intensity? To kneel beneath this man's armpit hair And the smouldering aroma of his sex? What should I do to plant a kiss Upon his toes bare upon the dust? — The images of all heroes, all saints All winged Hermes, all thieves Prostate themselves at this man's feet The man Grows even bigger In the pale sky marked by a hot trembling iron While my shadow and I Beside the rustling pear Do not even stand as tall as the tree The Dead Boy [3] I am a boy, who not knowing love, Suddenly has fallen from the summit of a frightening infancy Into the darkness of a well Dark, watery hands choke my delicate neck Innumerable needles of coldness push into me Killing my heart, wet as a fish Within each internal organ, I swell like a flower As I move horizontally along the surface Of the subterranean water Before long, from the green horn in my groin A sprout none too reliable will grow Crawling up the heavy soil with thin hands The day will come when like a pallid face Its tree will rustle in the painful light For I desire as much space inside me for the light As space for the shadow I Need Nothing Nothing Other Than That [4] I need nothing Nothing other than I need nothing Nothing other than I need nothing Nothing other than I need nothing Nothing other than I need nothing Nothing other than Lovers in the Guise of Wolf-Gods [5]
"Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their
own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves." The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Romans 1:24 The wolf is the tree; the gale, the grass; The wolf runs through the forest sky and The wind over the face of the earth The trees scream, the grass hums — A soul stands stark naked Innards covered with blood Fangs of breath, the red of a scream — The curtain of darkness Creases, flapping in the air Teeth cracking and crunching — White foam — Claws rake the snowy mud The wolf by the tree, the gale in the grass: The tree-wolf is the wind And gale in the grass, the wolf Who will eat this fire? Who will run with the wind? Who will be the one to tear apart The heart convulsing in his hand? Who will change The forest covered in green To woods brimming with blowing snow Change in a flash a nest of love To a clump of infertile grass? The wolf, the agile darkness, Eats of fire, filling his starving flanks Then he gallops with the wind In his fur coat of a thousand glittering needles Warm blood soaks his flint teeth and claws — With his frozen breath The wolf, the spirit of winter, The blinding powder of bone Changes the young forest Into a forest of death and Eyes of fire into eyes of mud When he suckles at my breast The man becomes an infant wolf, He chews with a long, heavy bites On my pale, peach-coloured nipple Until even the last drop Has been sucked away When the milk comes no more, Blood and pain spill forth. My blood sucked away, I fade then swoon — In my unconscious dreams Filled with fear Without noticing I too have become a wolf Just like him Our love devours us, A love which tears With the teeth In our eyes Which exchange glances Are trees in flame Tearing, devouring, The backs of our kissing mouths Fangs of breath Seething blood Spouts out and Instantly freezes Our torture Is sympathy, Pain is pleasure Our wiry hair shudders Around our long shadows As we embrace Night in the park bushes — Lovers pull the wolf's head Completely over their own Wolves pull the heads of lovers Over their own and starve On the summit of the moon A wolf couple dances Where their chests rub together Soft fur against soft fur The small bird of love Is crushed to death A standing couple Clinks their glasses Of thick, blood-coloured wine; Upon them, downy fur of air Shines with a full lustre On a long couch, The couple tilts their ears towards a record Churning out bloodthirsty music With shuffling steps, The couple slides out into the hallway shadows And sucks blood from One another's backward bent necks In the garden, The couple kills a rosebud On the edge of a fountain that boils over — A sickly thin finger blurs its fresh blood One wolf faces the wall and silently Strikes out poetry of love on a typewriter The ink of the typewriter Is a warm, sanguine red Jostling saints of the stain-glass windows shattering into tiny fragments Continue to call out and be born in the dark gloom inside the tilting bell — Powdered silver of countless echoes — Clusters of genistas trailing downwards — Frightening ruinous gold hemming in the storm clouds — Inside the bushes a fully cloaked wolf howls and Lovers drink continuously of one another's blood In the cemetery where dead souls And maggot-filled flesh Hold their breath and whisper He stepped on the brakes — Tires squealed and slid over the thick grass Wrapped in our silence We flung away our coats And threw off our underclothes Suddenly embracing as if in anger — Outside, the rowan tree outside grazed our window It was as if the dead were saying, "We want to live" "We want to live" But in our moans and gushing pain We ignored the dead A glass jar holding honey-coloured alcohol — A glass pot full of rock candy — A tiny flask of perfumed oil — A mortar of poison — The glass of the ceiling Suddenly shatters and As fragments glitter amongst fragments, They avalanche down The roaring navy blue Feeling the awl of a fragment, for a moment The city of glass echoes above the earth And shatters into pieces Right then, the lovers pull The wolf's head over their own Facing the round sky Towers jostle Sharp points glitter A thousand bells ring A thousand bells echo The pigeon clock rings through the universe A cuckoo-clock screams A clock-owl shows its red mouth The pendulum of the great clock of heaven Springs out of place; the springs flip Gears snap and fly off in opposite directions The Roman numerals VIII IX X XI XII Turn somersaults on the face and fall Beloved lovers quickly Pull the wolves' heads over their own These men who love one another, Naked and in pairs, Fall in the pose of their love Endnotes [1] Takahashi Mutsuo, "Bara no ki," Takahashi Mutsuo shishū, Gendaishi bunko 19 (Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1969):16-17. For another translation of the same poem, see Mutsuo Takahashi, 'The Rose Tree,' Poems of a Penisist, trans. Hiroaki Sato, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1975, p. 9; reprinted in Takahashi Mutsuo, 'Six Poems,' Partings at Dawn: An Anthology of Japanese Gay Literature, ed. Stephen D Miller, San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1996, p. 221. [2] Takahashi Mutsuo, 'Sono hito,' Takahashi Mutsuo shishū, Gendaishi bunko 19 (Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1969) 17-18. For another translation of the same poem, see Mutsuo Takahashi, 'The Man,' in Poems of a Penisist, trans. Hiroaki Sato, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1975, pp. 10-11. [3] Takahashi Mutsuo, "Shinda shōnen," Takahashi Mutsuo shishū, Gendaishi bunko 19, Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1969, p. 30. A CD recording of Takahashi reading the original Japanese text is included with several other works in Takahashi Mutsuo, Voice Garden: koe no niwa (Zushi: Star Valley Library, 1996). The text is read with musical accompaniment by the composer and pianist Takahashi Yūji, a close friend of Takahashi Mutsuo. The CD accompanying the booklet contains another translation of the poem by Hiroaki Sato. For a second translation of the same poem, see Takahashi Mutsuo, 'Dead Boy,' Like Underground Water: The Poetry of Mid-Twentieth Century Japan, trans. and ed. by Naoshi Koriyama and Edward Lueders, Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1995, p. 227. [4] Takahashi Mutsuo, 'Boku wa nani mo iranai sono hoka ni wa,' Takahashi Mutsuo shishū, Gendaishi bunko 19, Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1969, p. 21. For another translation of the same poem, see Takahashi Mutsuo, 'I Need Nothing But...,' Like Underground Water: The Poetry of Mid-Twentieth Century Japan, trans. and ed. by Naoshi Koriyama and Edward Lueders, Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 1995, pp. 227-28. [5] Takahashi Mutsuo, 'Ōkami-gami no katachi o shita koibito-tachi,' Kegaretaru mono wa sara ni kegaretaru mono o nase, Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1966, pp. 29-51; reprinted in Takahashi Mutsuo, Takahashi Mutsuo shishū, Gendaishi bunko 19, Tokyo: Shichōsha, 1969, pp. 66-71. 
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