(“Tree” photo credit: gratisography)
Translation by Hiroaki Sato
(For Sumiko’s birthday)
God is, even if He is not.
Also He is humorous enough
to resemble some kind of man.
This time
with a gigantic phallus over
the horizon of my dream
He came on a picnic.
Incidentally
I regret that
I did nothing for Sumiko on her birthday.
I would at least like to
send the seeds of the phallus God brought
into that thin, tiny, lovely voice of
Sumiko who is at the other end of the line.
Forgive me, Sumiko,
for the phallus has grown larger day by day
until, now in the middle of the cosmos,
he refuses to move like a bus that has broken down.
So, if you want to see
the beautiful night sky where the stars are scatttering or
some other man dashing down the highway with a hot woman
you really must try
to lean out of the bus window
and peer in.
The phallus
begins to stir and if he’s near the cosmos
he’s good to look at. At such times
Sumiko,
the lonely way light shifts in the starry sky,
the funny cold of the midday,
really gets to you,
what you can see, heartfelt, you see so well
any human can only go insane.
The phallus has neither name nor personality
nor has he a date so that
it’s only when someone passes by
carrying him like a festival shrine
that from the way people fuss, sometimes,
you know where he lives.
And in such hubbub
the primitive riots and the sudden hollow of
oaths and curses of the seeds yet
uncontrolled by God
reach your ear. On occasion
God is prone to be absent;
instead, He leaves only debt and phallus
and goes off somewhere, or so it seems,
and now, the phallus God forgot to take with him
is walking toward you.
It’s young, cheerful, and
full of such artless confidence, so that
it resembles the shadow of an astute smile.
It may seem as if the phallus has grown numerously
and numerously is walking toward you,
but in fact, he’s singular and walks alone.
From whatever horizon you see him,
he’s evenly devoid of face and word,
Something like that,
Sumiko, I’d like to give you on your birthday.
I’d like to cover your existence with it; then
to you yourself would become invisible, and
you might become the will itself called phallus
and wander, endlessly,
until I embrace you amorphously.
About the Author
Kazuko Shiraishi is Japan’s leading “Beat” Poet. Born and brought up in Vancouver but taken back to Japan before the Pacific War, Shiraishi at age 17 was discovered by the modernist Kitazono Katsue (1902-78) who founded the artists’ group VOU. Her initial influences were Miró, Dali, Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus, and Faulkner’s Sanctuary. She published her first book of poems, Tamago no furu Machi (Town Where Eggs Fall), in 1951, when a university student.
Seasons of Sacred Lust, My Floating Mother, and Let Those Who Appear: Poetry.
About the Translator
On Haiku, Japanese Women Poets, Bashō’s Narrow Road: Spring & Autumn Passages and others. His most recent book is 47 Samurai: A Tale of Vengence & Death in Haiku and Letters.
