Dog Autumn
By Seungja Choi
Translated By Cathy Park Hong & Won-Chung Kim
Dog autumn attacks.
Syphilis autumn.
And death visits
one of twilight’s paralyzed legs.
Everything dries out
and all roads’ boundaries blur.
The old singer’s voice
droops on the recording.
“Hi Jugsun—no? This isn’t Jugsun? Jugsun.”
In midair, the telephone line
loses the receiver, and once-departed lovers
never return, not even in a dream.
In a guest room inside the tavern of time,
where the stagnant waste-water of memory
stinks like horse piss, I ask,
in a voice awakened from disheveled death:
How far have I gone, how far yet to go
before the river becomes the sea?
Translated from the Korean
Notes:
This poem is from Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me (Action Books, 2020), translated by Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong, and is reprinted with permission of Action Books.
Source: Poetry (January 2021)