Two Nouns

It was a bit of an experiment to occupy my mind as it refused to sleep: a pair of quatrains in iambic pentameter (not strictly so, obviously - I'd rather say what I have to say than be a slave to meter) on a pair of images I'd had floating around in my brain during the car ride from my parents' house to Colleen's mother's; one a fantasy (an Alexandrian library abuzz with men reading [aloud] and as such performing books) and the other a familiar reality. I'd written [sic] two perfect quatrains (as perfect goes) in my head, rehearsed them for a few hours (or so it seemed), and eventually went to sleep.

The next day, Christmas, I spent the last leg of a twelve hour car ride with Colleen and her mother to North Dakota tossing about the two quatrains, or at least what I could remember of them.

two nouns

a finest tomb for books and brains on the verge
of calling each other minds in the clear light
of a quiet beam lying still against
[

the old, Alexandrian chatterbox
kicking up dusty clouds of noisome bodies
sweating out[
]silent tongues.

The square bracket thing I stole from Anne Carson (who stole it from editors of classical texts) to represent a lack, specifically what I couldn't remember despite repeating it back to myself off and on for a few hours. Once I finally gave up, I noticed something about the flow of these two quatrains - rather their new flow, the happy result of artifice and chance. I hadn't intended it, but the accidental result of "lying still against... the old, Alexandrian chatterbox" both cements the juxtaposition of these two visions of libraries and elides them. This is how flow is supposed to work, I think it says something about the machinations of my brain that I only stumbled upon it. A more studied example of how I would approach flow came to me as Colleen's Aunt Tracy's cat was busy shedding all over me, and her Uncle Bob waited in the backyard for a buck to come along so he could shoot it in the head.

in minds
entombed
in books
encrypted--
in books
entombed
in bricks
envisioned--
in minds
enslaved
to books
imprinted--
two books
enslaved
to brains
implanted--

I intended this as a round or a series of lines whose "end" could flow grammatically back into the beginning like a verbal Möebius strip. This isn't quite how flow generally works in hip-hop, but it was at least an attempt at a kind of poetry whose embedded sound patterns are a bit more comprehensible than the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets'.

shiawase na goro ni kiiteta ongaku o
pokke ni irete
chikatetsu ni noru

the music I listened to when I was happy
I put in my pocket
and get on the subway

In the past, I've referred to Sato Mayumi's poetry as, well, shallow, perhaps because I didn't exactly get it at first. Unlike, say, Tawara Machi, oft praised for revolutionizing waka diction, who largely adheres to the conventions of classical versification, Mayumi has found a place for lines in a poetic form that has been by and large line-less. More than that, her language is thoroughly mundane, whose lack of profundity I originally took for banality, and seeks to find in the mundane something sublime. By breaking up the single line form she manages to effect a series of semantic turns not unlike what I remember Mike mentioning in relation to the choruses of the Oedipus Tyrannos.

shinu koto no
kimatta hito no
sewa o suru you ni
waratte bakari ita
koi

a love
where you can but smile
as if caring for
someone who's decided
to die

The problem inherent in translating this poem is a matter of the diametrically opposed syntaxes of Japanese and English. Where my translation moves from love to death, Mayumi's moves from death to love: shinu koto no (to die) kimatta hito no (person who's decided) sewa o suru you ni (as if caring for) waratte bakari ita (do nothing but smile) koi (love). Thus the semantic progression becomes, according to the sequence of lines, "to die - a person who's decided to die - as if caring for someone who's decided to die - doing nothing but laugh as if caring for someone who's decided to die" and all that ends up modifying the simple word "love." The move from death to love is synonymous with, in my mind, the emergence of hope, making my move from love to death synonymous with despair. I'd get pretty down about translation, then, if I didn't occasionally remind myself--accidentally--that something is gained, even in loss.

Two Short Essays on Nausea

the best songs are dyspeptic, you see,
or do not, should you be blinded
by afterthoughts of nausea the lyric
posits in your stomach's brain;
the best songs are the worst you feel
dripping into your weak bowel--
the best you can do with songing it
is, in feeding your throat soundthoughts,
fail to say what you mean and let
them chew on the uncooked notion that
the best songs survive the acids
and the squeeze and find themselves
embedded in the warm, brown folds
of wet, discarded nutriment.

***

Upon examining the constitution of my diarrhetic leavings in the toilet, before sending them on their way to flushland, I was able to make out a few kernels of corn and a roasted mushroom: my stomach flu must have made them pass through my system too quickly. That was when I remembered reading - maybe in high school - how the prisoners at Auschwitz, Dachau, and those other German horrors would be so starved at times they would pick through their own feces in order to find any undigested bits of food. I can't imagine what kind of happiness there is in finding a golden kernel of corn wrapped in a warm, brown turd. And happiness it is, or at least joy, a kind of joy we'd never entertain outside of a purely intellectual exercise; we might try to simulate such happiness but inevitably fail due to our unwillingness to admit that profound joy demands profound suffering. In this unwillingness we (pace our savage friends) are quintessentially American.