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releasing from your mouth
like a burst of song.
And Y Prefecture
is just so close by.
The girls and I talk.
We say:
start a dream journal.
take up ikebana.
make your own jam.
We say:
Next spring
let’s go to Australia together
look at the kangaroos.
We say:
turn up that sweet vibevox happygirl music
tap the communal PA
we’ve got a long walk ahead of us today
and at the end of it
a fire like six perfect flowers
arranged in an iron vase.
INK, WATER, MILK
Three things are happening at the same time.
It will be hard for you to believe—being only a reader with employment concerns and a jaded cultural consciousness and having limited patience for this sort of nonsense—that they are happening all at once. Not only at the same time, but in the same place. One on top of the other. Like three blue bowls nesting. Like three cells of film aligned atop a light box. If you will sit quietly inside the palm of my hand I will keep the wind out and we can watch the three things happen into each other. Like ink and water and milk. I will tell you the truth at the beginning so that you will recognize it in the end: there is nothing in this world but ink and water and milk. Of course it doesn’t make any sense now. Three things are happening at the same time. There will be some natural seepage of cause and effect.
There. This is my hand. It is big enough. There are lines on it like anyone’s hand. A ring. A short, straight scar underneath the pinky finger. Never mind how I got it. It is hard and twisted. The cut was deep. You can rest your tea on it and it will not fall over.
It would be best, really, if you could tell one thing, and I tell another, and a third person tell the third, so that our voices also happen at the same time, interleaving like fingers. But I do not ask for so much cacophony. I will tell them all and you will remember them thatched as tightly as a roof.
INK
A summer moon sits heavy as a buoy on Sagami Bay. Cicadas shriek at it, but it is placid. It bobs up and down on the still water. Among the bells of the real buoys, the soft bells of the moon go unnoticed. The sturgeons deep under the water hear them—and the giant clams.
Kyorinrin also hears the moon. Down in the green-black hills, where the camphor and the cassia and the plum and the red pine and the willow crowd together as close as commuters on the night train, he listens to the moon in an abandoned paper umbrella factory. The windows have holes in them like fists through frost. A hole in the roof sags and gapes like a mouth. The door is bolted and boarded, the pipes burst open like iron flowers, and a sign informs you that you may lease it, if you wish, from a holding company that was liquidated in 1976. The sign is freshly painted. White characters on a vermilion background. Himura Hol
ding Company. Interested Parties Are Begged to Inquire. 075 871 7746.
Inside the paper umbrella factory the floor shines. Kyorinrin does his best to keep it livable. One thousand kerosene lamps burn, on every pallet, crate, employees’ washbasin, manager’s desk, inspection platform, dye sink, industrial lathe, glue vat, bank of lockers, cafeteria table, pile of ledgers, the gleaming floor. They burn during the day and the night, and they burn a deep shade of cyan. Their fuel is also cyan. There are actually only nine hundred eighty-one lamps. But one thousand is a better number.
