Wandering Beyond1

By Shuri Kido
Translated By Forrest Gander & Tomoyuki Endo

A eulogy for Minoru Yoshioka

The deer croon, “Miew, miew”—
                                                     Who arrives
as a stranger with a pine bough
from a picture,
with an eye foreseeing cataclysms falling from the sky,
cataclysms that hatch open here on earth?
Under the morning sun, piling up round pebbles?2
Above his head flows a stream of peridinian
plankton, “dinoflagellates,” or
          (a form of spirit?).
                The woods go transparent. Some
scarlet silk pulled over a skeleton.
His lips, a “delete key,” his eye pulling
back from and focused behind the company of others—
                                                                      some poet?
At dawn, going out to pick eggplants,
and in the afternoon, napping under
the swaying double-peaked gourds, and later polishing one until it shines,
and then at night, finding words “reflected” on its surface.
                                             The summer solstice of a life.
What prevails of the world is its silence.
Suffering hay fever at the end of the century,
imagining the curve of a woman’s body where green barley waves.
The afterimage (of a skeleton?) floats by.
Translated from the Japanese

Notes:

1 The title comes from the first chapter of the book Chuang Tzu.
2 In Buddhism, an impossible act which those who precede their parents in death perform after leaving this world.

 

Read the Japanese-language version, 逍遙遊篇――吉岡実追悼.

Source: Poetry (March 2022)