Island of Infinite Sky

I want to cover myself in blue. The birds are far. Black plastic bag on the street. Why are beaks sharp. Blue falls.

You can’t talk of blue anymore and the more you think of blue the more you’re pushed outside of blue. Like ice in water. The shadow nearing. The bird that doesn’t come. The sharpness fallinga way.

Blue, which you’ve never even seen. Stacked talons and air. The wings of the pavement lying flat are pretty.

Cold pan, tomatoes leaned over. Expressions on faces trip and fall. From alleys from roofs from hills. Like a pool. The angles of birds whose four corners are alike.

Habits, you fold up thrice and put in thesink.

Erased, the birds of morning.

Bird

Bird

Bird                              Bird

Bird                    Bird

Bird

Today’s weather. Your habits of speech. In the end, blue. In the end, blue once more. Because you were away from blue for so long, you can’t have any islands besides blue. Blueless birds with blue.

In the end, all this is blue. So you say. With your sharp mouth, birdlike.

Night of Cherry Blossoms

Teacher, the winter has gone already, and spring has come. Light shines brightest in the moment of its turning over – I’m finally beginning to see that. There have been a few tests, but I’ve gotten used to living in Japan now, I’m pulling my weight.

The cherry blossom is pushing forth its round bud. The air throbs all over. I think I may witness the moment the petals open, a first. A warm breeze blows against me while I walk the river, but I feel a chill deeper than I’ve ever felt before.

I’ve stopped writing poems. Feels like a dream, those days when I sat at a desk, writing and erasing one sentence over and over until the day broke. In those days, I had gone and buried my two hands deep in the woods and I couldn’t hold anything until new hands sprouted.

You could say I got a poem for each time I gave up my hands. Sometimes, it itched and ached. All I could do was stay stuck in the dark like an incense stick, smoldering away. Thought spun like a crazed circle, accelerating infinitely.

Teacher, you always said that everything was in one place. I hoped to understand what that meant someday. Since the bewitched and possessed are bound to end up hunch backed.

I’m keeping a bird in the place where my heart once was. It flew in at a sleepy hour and built its nest there, wouldn’t leave, and I tried, for a while, to run it out, but then gave up. I gave it a name and it became my only family in this foreign place.

That the very beautiful sometimes approaches not life, but death – if I could live without imagining such athing, might I have changed? That because of its chill, spring shines likeglass.

Translatedby Hedgie Choi