Kazue Shinkawa

Though the water rises above its rim
swallows one dime . . .
two dimes . . . and three

and you think this time it'll spill over
but it doesn't,
the water remaining tense.

I, too, had days I filled up like this
with thoughts of someone,
remaining tense.

Why doesn't the glass break?
In those days I did
break . . . in the end.
...

I have memories of
buying a sheet of beautiful ocean.
In a market with a ceiling of blue sky
I happened to see a man selling oceans
who, like a carpet merchant, was spreading them out and rolling them up, spreading them out and rolling them up,
though like a landscape seen in an afternoon nap
I can't clearly remember what the market was like.

I was able to
go to the ocean, without drowning, balanced,
because like a vessel just launched
I had a brilliantly drawn waterline.
But that lasted only for a while.
When we moved, I rolled it up again
and put it in the shed behind our new house
along with junk and forgot about it.

From the crack by the door of the shed a seagull
suddenly flew up this morning, flapping its wings, to my consternation.
Reviving at this late date — what can I do?
What can I do with the ocean
that has started flooding the backyard
without even giving me time to redraw the waterline that has peeled off?
...

Ode 17 From 'Odes to Fire'
"May I have a light?"
A man approached me
and I handed him the cigarette I was smoking.
At such a time, on a park bench,
a woman enjoying the night breeze, smoking, yes,
but I wasn't of a suspicious age, and the man himself
looked like someone who'd say, "I just recently retired."

It probably was his last one for the day.
He lit the cigarette in his mouth
and took a delicious, deep drag on it.
In the darkness I saw
a tiny light come alive and breathe like a ditch firefly.

Before then I had handed things
to many people:
silk, fur, liquor, gold engravings.
But never once had I seen
any of these glow like that
the moment it moved to the other hand.
Not even a love quatrain I'd written with all my heart.

When he finished smoking,
he said, "Thank you," and slowly walked away.
The same words came to my throat.
"Thank you," I said,
after the man disappeared in the darkness.
...

Children's poem
My big brother's wheat-stalk whistle
went tweet
when he blew it

I wonder why
mine doesn't tweet

A lark said tweet
up in the sky
...

Children's poem
Mom is
peeling an apple

She is unwinding the end of a red ribbon
wound around a round body
round and round. . .

Peeled and naked, the apple looks cold
it looks embarrassed

It's a pity to see it cut in quarters
"May I have it as it is?"
I gently place it
on my palm
...

Children's poem
Beyond the sky there is another sky
and beyond that sky there is another
however far you go there's only sky

A cloud, in the shape of a boat,
is floating in the sky, but
the sky has no harbor where it can anchor
how far does it travel I wonder

On this side of the sky there is another sky
and on this side of that sky there is another
it seems to come down to us from time to time

Sunflowers touch the sky
dragonflies touch it, too, with their wings
I am lying on my back in the field
touching the sky with the tip of my nose
...

I am
a vessel with no lid
like an odd bowl or a deep dish
thrown away in a vacant lot

Yet in the morning
after it rained all night then stopped
I can own the fresh blue sky
sharing it with the pool of water within me

Dead butterflies, birds' feathers
expired contracts and the like
get thrown into me at times
but some days the wind blows strong
and cleans them up for me

No one casts a heartfelt look inside me but
in the night when moonbeams gracefully reach inside me
I can happily joyfully send back the beams
from my vacant depths

Is this about discarded china?
No. This is about myself.
...

As I sit on the grass
listening to the faltering song
of a little boy, so young yet,
having trouble carrying a tune

I feel
I am in my true being
in my only self
a half tone off from the people around me
a half tone off from all in the cosmos
which I believed to be my hundred selves
to be my own thousand selves

. . . . . . . dandelions, fluffy seeds
bursting out, bursting out . . . . .

It would be good to fly away somewhere
or without flying away
it's just as good to sit like this instead
blown in the wind
...

for children
The sun
pokes his face above the horizon
saying, "Good morning!"
but a single star
still lingers in the Eastern sky

On the sea, too,
there's a single boat
that has not moved
since last evening

The star and the boat have been talking
with each other all night long
The star talked about the vast universe
The boat spoke about plentiful salt water

I am sure neither can bring itself
to say goodbye
because each has lots and lots more
to talk about
...

Our neighbor's wife
has given birth to a lovely baby girl.
Why can't you bear a child?
laments my husband who loves children.

I keep silent
and cook rice
mornings and evenings,
like this, pricking up my ears,
listening in the pot
to the prayers of the rice.
...

from The Boy
No matter what I say,
this child takes off something
along with his shirt.
Again he's fallen asleep
without putting on pyjamas, naked.
Tucking him in,
I carefully look at him:
Is this my child?
I pick up his shirt.
Again I look into his sleeping face.
Is this my child?
No, I don't, I don't know
the child sleeping here:
a tree that has fallen,
a star that has dropped,
a boat that has lost its shore.
...

What to do with the rose in my garden,
this remaining rose?

I ended up looking at the abandoned garden.
My old mother, senile, asleep,
carelessly showed it
because of the unusually humid heat past noon
with no autumn wind to stir the blinds.
The withered gate that couldn't possibly have
anyone to wait for or to visit
was not so much obscene
as openly, casually, innocent.
Having hurried past the verandah outside her chamber,
I wipe the sweat that covers my skin.
The heat of this year, this crazy heat.

What to do with the rose in my garden,
this private rose?
...

Can there be anything like a simple, pure act? A virtue like gentleness that doesn't hurt anything?
My movements began to show stagnation and my speech to lisp as days passed. This was because opening the window unthinkingly, pulling up the zipper on my back, or peeling an onion — between such extremely everyday acts — I began to hear often unidentifiable screams. Was it that in opening the window, I'd also opened something stupendous? Was it that by pulling up the zipper, I'd also forcibly meshed together something — about which there was an eternal injunction against sealing — by making the aluminum teeth hold it fast? Or else, if gods are things that amorphously permeate our surroundings in innocuous form, by taking the skin off an onion, I must have committed the rude act of plucking the skull off one of them. Unlike a cutely hemstitched pity or sentimentality, of the sort of compassion and sorrow you might feel when you find the corpses of three ants stuck to the felt sole of your slipper, these screams assaulted me at any time, accompanied by a regret resembling a harrowing pain which, each time I took a step, created an irrecoverable distance between me and the world. Because I was breathing, careful not to make the slightest crack in the air, when I felt suffocated, I staggered out, panting, for oxygen which would kindly push into me like a violent man.
Already darkly, the shadow of the earth was falling on me. Despite the fact that it was a bright noon-day, my family often lost sight of me in the small garden.
...

More readily than a ribbon in your hair
my outline will come undone.
What puff of wind,
what sway of flame,
what sound of voice
will readily undo this knot?

Invisible
but it's right there,
like a sense,
always, right there.

*

In the innocuous color of iced strawberries,
when and where did the snapdragon
learn the smell of human death?
Emitting a sweetly sour odor,
it drops its flowers late at night thump thump.
What a
frightful frightful spectacle!
Who taught this babyish child
the secret rite of grownups?

*

Like the pond water in early spring
I wait with a smile on my face.
At times a titmouse or stonechat flies in,
spills a silverberry from the tip
of his beak.
A ring spreads.
The silverberry sinks.
Which of them will death be:
the ring that goes on spreading
or the substance that rots at once?
...

In a dream
I was asked the way, and I told him.
He walked off in the direction I pointed,
stepping on the undergrass in a sparse stand of trees.

It was the wrong path.
After walking about awhile
I left by another narrow path,
but it was because the morning was there.

He must still be continuing
to wander in my dream,
the night continuing on, no daybreak in sight,
beyond the sparse stand of trees. . . .

Shall I crouch like this by the narrow path
to wait awhile, getting wet with dew?
He might come back
and violently take me into the depths of dreams.

Shall I imprison him in a dream dungeon with no way out,
and secretly torment him for a long, long time,
a man who has walked through all my dark corners
that I myself have never stepped in?
...