SILENT WHISTLE-BLOWERS

GORO TAKANO

B L A Z E V O X [ B O O K S ] Buffalo, New York

SILENT WHISTLE-BLOWERS by Goro Takano Copyright © 2015 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza Cover Art by Atsunobu Katagiri First Edition ISBN: 978-1-60964-218-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015939197 BlazeVOX [books] 131 Euclid Ave Kenmore, NY 14217 Editor@blazevox.org

publ i sher o f we ird l i t t l e books

BlazeVOX [ books ] blazevox.org

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10

9

Parents’ Open Day

After a train of hearses went by, I crossed the street

and reached the main gate of my two kids’ elementary school

at which an old woman was feeding a party of feral cats

“They are the only kids I have,” she said expressionlessly

“What makes you think you were lucky to be born as Japanese?” ―

passing before the question on a noticeboard, I first stopped by

my son’s classroom where the teacher of English was asking

her students whether or not the sentence “LET’S JOIN US” is

weird ― my son raised his hand and answered: “Must be okay”

Once the teacher’s careful explanation started, I went out

and, next, went to my daughter’s Japanese-language classroom

The male teacher was reading aloud the excerpt of a poem

in his textbook to his half-bored students ―

“Strange Neighborhood” by the Showa-era poet Murano Shiro

Every garbage bin in this neighborhood

Is riddled with death

Such as fishbones and the snipped bottoms of sausages

One day, a vagrant

Lifts the lid and discovers

The bin is, in fact, bottomless and so deep like a well

The hole goes all the way through

To the other side of the world

Must be somebody’s secret passage, the bum thinks

He looks into it more carefully this time

And finds the inside of the Earth coreless and hollow

And the Underworld nonexistent

10

He clicks his tongue

And shuts the lid

I approached my daughter’s desk and peeped into her textbook

The words “WHY? WHY?” were carelessly penciled on the page

at the end of the poem’s final stanza

I left the school alone and, on my way home, I tried seeking

a garbage bin and a vagrant, but neither of them was around me

I saw the same old woman reprimanded by a young policeman

“Your feeding will only increase the number of street cats ―

all of which will be euthanized after all,” the officer yelled

The cats huddled around me like bums, and I suddenly thought

my son’s answer may not be necessarily wrong ― one of the cats

tried to crawl upon the lid of a half-open garbage box set behind

the policeman and began to show her confusion as to whether

its lid should be completely opened or shut, when another train

of hearses approached me and the old woman and all the cats

[Note]

The original Murano Shiro poem I translated for this piece is titled, in Japanese, 変な界隈 (“hen-na-kaiwai”), which is included in The Poetry of Shiro Murano [Tokyo: Shicho-sha, 1987].

11

Quatrains (Part 1)

Looking for Saint Helena on a world map

after surviving another sleepless night

half believing Puff the magic dragon

still frolicks by the sea in the autumn mist

* Staring at the trace of the stitches

on an old wound he’s got in his mind

all day, a white-haired man in a wheelchair

misses masses of flowers ahead

* Each nonsense can be a myth, as long as you never hesitate

to pay amply for the cremation of your beloved cat, whereas

you continue to refuse bluntly the birth of a new crematorium

in your cliffy backyard littered with tons of lemming furs

* Littered with empty bottles of countless travelers,

the peak of a sacred mountain awaits another revolution

Harboring there alone is a legendary yeti

wondering if his own body is a mere superstition

* My name was kidnapped and brutally raped today

“It’s lucrative business now,” the kidnappers said

Later on, my country was kidnapped and forced

to make love to me before the eyes of the band

*

Never looking away from clean mortality tables

in her hand, an old life-insurance company woman sits

12

on a toilet bowl and, in the next stall, a young girl

folds a clean toilet paper to make origami hearts

* Remember a comfortable beach exclusively for servicemen

at the edge of your cerebrum, where you eat the fancy liver

of an endangered snake sadly, and your fancy lover

whispers: “What would you do if your mom was a ‘comfort woman’?”

* Through every stainless loudspeaker

a new solemn kumbaya anthem comes

along with an inaudible noise saying:

“Kiddo, no easy way for social changes!”

* Like a doctor who aims to remove surgically

a cancer out of her own dying body

an old piano convulses her keyboard

in no spotlight on her melody

* What is the biggest vice

on a composite photo of a poor nation’s

military base where a lethal nuke

is only a digitally-forged buzz?

13

A Dragonfly

Today on your inner stage

something surely dies

and from its very ashes

tomorrow and yesterday are born

Born quietly on a puddle this morning

was a transparent dragonfly dreaming,

in its larva days, about a silent old man buying

a glass of spirits one day and getting change

Now, in its transparent mind, the fragile insect

tries to revive the man’s language in its dream

But the only dragonfly-language-like sound left

in its hearing is a clatter of ice cubes

Wasn’t that a poet who sang this way?

A poem is born when the big top is pitched in me

where a trapeze creaks and a menagerie roars

and a clown taunts my guts with his ceaseless pratfalls

and my brain changes itself into a contortionist

Wasn’t that the sick who prayed this way?

I want my double who is a thatcher on a roof

of a war-torn, two-storied pagoda in winter

Hope his slow job continues without a fall

and hope he has a mind of winter like ore

14

Wasn’t that a woman who whispered to a mirror this way?

Just like me, you are a page

in an invisible dictionary

whose longevity depends

on our imagination, entirely

Wasn’t that a sinner who cried this way?

Moss on my sleeping tongue

starts overflowing my yawning

mouth tonight again, and spreads

over the seeds of pangs in my lung

Wasn’t that a painter who sought a landscape like this?

A fallen cherry-blossom petal

lands coquettishly in the rain

on a money order discarded

on the pavement of a redlight district

Wasn’t that a priest who lamented this way?

Piled on a supermarket shelf are

letter pads exclusively for living wills

“Sale! Use this, instead of

eco-unfriendly ones,” a pitchman shouts

15

Wasn’t that a playwright who sighed this way?

Full of meaning is a performerless stage

stared at intently by a crowd that loves

uniformly the word “identity,” each of whose fingers

seems too frozen to touch a neighbor’s hand

As the dragonfly begins to lose its transparency

it finally revives one human word: “dragonfly”

Then the foot of the silent old man who wrote

this stanza falls on its premature body

16

Quatrains (Part 2)

Only when sinners who need narratives

about who they are thrive on autopilot

and every selfless righteous mentor perishes,

can truly transcendent love be born, like a plot

*

A child who had lost his loved one

in my last night’s dream was staring

at a lonely coconut washed upon

the uninhabited shore all day

* Whenever my head is gently massaged

by the healing hands of Eros all night

the salivating Thanatos in my blood reminds me

caveat emptor is this therapy’s rule

* A two-dimensional world abounds

in the fragrance of flowers whose spurt

wets my eyeballs and leaves them lulled

again in a four-dimensional world

* Whereas a new wild-goose chase

works up the universe with no rest

I keep hoeing dawn to dusk, calling

weeds “sweetie” and the sterile soil “comrade”

*

How would I feel if I were reborn to be

a genius scribe who writes love letters to the Earth

17

in my few but fascinating words for all

humanity without exposing their disgrace?

* Even when you watch a relief pitcher with zero ERA

slowly taking the mound on television at a barbershop

with every wisp of your cut hair falling like an elegy

another random killing is called a mercy somewhere

* A son says: “Dad, your words don’t move me at all”

His face looks sinful, almost like his father’s

When the father is about to slap his son hard

their invisible bond turns quatrain again

* On a serene May Day, a throng of women gather in a park

and lie as one on the grass to mimic the dead, as their coach

cries: “Having no experience is another worthy experience!”

“Learn to die for your country with joy” is their slogan

* My desire to yield what I am not goes out

on a limb like an old father who keeps talking

loudly with his deceased wife in a hospital

waiting room, forlorn of all his children

18

A Wake Song

Around the end of dawn

A woman tells everybody else to leave her alone

With the embalmed corpse and shuts the door, quietly

She slowly undresses the dead

And stares at its withering penis

Put near the husband’s head in the wooden coffin

Is a washed-out photo of two gigantic rocks

Sticking out of Ha Long Bay, Vietnam, taken

During their honeymoon in the remote past

As if to reflect herself in a kaleidoscopic labyrinth

She starts to sing a nameless lullaby

Two rocks kissing Smoke and ashes don’t suit you

On the twilight bay A bit too early to go earthbound

When your heart was like a dud Rose of all roses, when will you

Or like incense smoke Break into flower one more time?

Two rocks kissing In your face I say our human language

Under blue moonlight Is a result of sexual selection, almost like

When a war crawled out This seductive dysfunction; now I nudge

And another crawled in A gyre widening from this rocking cradle

Two rocks kissing Evil as it looks, it is the calmest

Near a dragon’s tranquil sleep Helpless as it is, it is fierce and sly

When you wondered if Honey of generation, how can I resist

The peace you’d chanted might be evil Abiding by this last curfew?

19

Two rocks kissing World is watching my aching heart

In the winter rain Conceiving a changeless work of art

By a floating house By calling to what I have handled least,

For the floating world My own opposite, simply like this jest

When the woman cuts off the penis with a knife

The spreading waters turn rose-red in her sight

She will take to the grave this secret booty

And keep repeating her quiet honeymoon

Even after the cremation

(Note: Inspired by Kono Taeko and W. B. Yeats)

20

Quatrains (Part 3)

Behind the wall of anesthesia, my rotten molar,

tolerance personified, is now uprooted – the faint pain

I’m feeling on this dentist chair is its farewell warning

that every other part of my body will be soon like it

* If you see me in a time-lapse sequence

you’ll notice me vaporizing nonstop

My vapor mixes with the whirling ones of others

and spins like a top on my sleeping forehead

* You may be truly lucky whenever all the dead

you’ve long loved and missed but now forget

stand on a rainbow you cannot see over your head

and see you not yet sinful enough to be with them

* After running throughout the night

away from a cliché-drenched town

you’re now trickling back into what?

Why the identical town in the mist?

* A pointillistic watercolor of a skeleton

decomposes into numerous primary dots

They fly up in a night sky to become stars –

wasn’t that a lullaby my mom used to sing?

*

21

Like a medium who summons the dead

a larva of a cicada molts slowly

The cast-off skins of its peers invoke

war kids killed by their moms in a debacle

* “Until this moment you were in this world

From now on this whole world will be in you” –

will you be happy to face your own death

if this is the very last echo in your head?

* Instead of a can of soda, this vending machine

served me a letter in an empty bottle saying

“Leash / Beyond,” and I saw my penis whining,

quickly carbonated, and sucked into the bottle

* Every mirror I peek in to see myself

shows the word “sic” on my image, as if,

while the sun restlessly hesitates to sink,

the beauty of death soaks into us all

* In this sheer darkness

where love and hate squirm

like a tangle, so quietly

a cactus flower blooms

22

A Moviegoer’s Confession

Located far down in a cherry-blossom valley like a fallout shelter, the only movie theater in this town was already crowded and there was only one seat left, which I took in the dark

five minutes before the denouement of the late show.

The silent movie’s title was The Death of a Nation. Someone whispered, “What a cheap title, isn’t that a third-rate Griffith joke?” Appearing on the screen was a dying male botanist

sitting on a sofa alone.

[Intertitle] The botanist: “Long time ago, two different poisonous plants were growing side by side with each other in a sterile limestone cave, competing for the remaining

nourishment. And, night and day, they were respectively swarmed with a troop of blind ants.”

The botanist seemed like a guinea pig, whose mouth would never open. Someone

whispered again, “Is that really his voice?” Located behind the dying man was an obsolete microwave oven.

[Intertitle] The botanist: “One day, both plants bloomed poisonous flowers at the same

time, and the taller one’s poison fell all over the shorter one, leaving half of its ants dead.”

A close-up of the microwave, suddenly. The next intertitle said: “This fable is a truthful re-creation of what will happen again to this country while you all keep sitting there.”

Someone murmured again in the dark, “So the shorter flower lost this war, and now it is to

blame for the entire loss of its vassal insects.” I sensed the entire limestone floor of the theater swarming with ants.

[Intertitle] The botanist: “The remaining ants didn’t know of the deaths of their sworn

friends. They didn’t hate the weakness of their half-dead flower. And they wouldn’t need its formal apology, because it wasn’t a man of letters but just a flower they loved and

respected.”

A close-up of the microwave, again. Why did it remind me of a crematorium? [Intertitle] An invisible woman: “Focusing only on the similarities between a drudge like

you and the endangered flowers you luckily collected makes you my butt.”

The defeated-looking live ants appeared on the screen, one by one. They looked grateful for the very poison, and my own definition of death quivered. “This old man won’t be saved,”

someone breathed near me, “and I feel deeply for him. Isn’t this a happy ending?”

23

The film ended with the dying man undead, but all the lights remained off. My

understanding of the whole story was still vague, while abrupt swearwords were heard in the audiences. And I felt ants in great numbers creeping up my legs, chest, back, arms, and

face.

Spotlighted suddenly was an old man standing in the front row with a hammer in his hand, who was, apparently, the director of the film and looked exactly like the botanist.

“Welcome to the labyrinth of signs for pain and charity, my Poison People,” he shouted.

I was surprised to hear him say that all the characters in the film were cracked clay, not flesh and blood. “Because so are you,” he said, “And isn’t your half-life supported

completely by the sacrifices of others? Learn guilt!” Why did I imagine myself stuck in a microwave then?

To be honest, I came to this entertainment to join in the ad-hoc seclusion of my unseen

fellows, whose sacrifices had been believed to be the gravest in the history of this country. The man with the hammer said, “This film is my élan vital, my woman, but I would be

liberated without it.”

The same film will restart soon and, ant-covered, I’m wondering how many more times I must watch it until I can go back home. This theater will remain packed forever, and now I know the botanist used to be the Supreme Commander in the first part of this violent film.

24

Quatrains (Part 4)

From each crevice of a high stone wall

which stalls the drifting migration of those

who have narrowly escaped violence,

more and more verdant vines sprout

* In a classroom there is nothing but the same chairs,

which say in chorus: “We’re the genuine humans!”

“Me – fugue – multiple,” says the entire closed school,

the one you had graduated from before you were born

*

“This old fountain where you will sip water from now

is cursed, and will make you eternally return here” –

ignoring this superstition, I gulp the water to sense

all the cleaners of this relic destined to die for me

*

A rage which can hardly calm down itself

against you and me decides not to complain

and becomes a springboard for an absurd poem,

wishing us godlessly spoiled by reading it

*

A mathematician who tackles the moral question

of whether a killer executed before TV cameras

can feel truly happy like Camus’s Meursault

is a woman I’m wishing to rape my egoism

*

Americans call it a blue story, Japanese a pink one

25

Chinese call it a yellow story, Spanish a green one

You and I are going to read this rainbow story

where all the rays in the cosmos have an orgy together

*

“I wish I could visit a shrine whose priest is a robot

who gives me, if I cast coins into her offering box,

a series of hard problems to solve to keep me happy

and alive,” a senile woman says to herself in a coma

*

After everything else perishes, only left in this

universe may be an army of translucent jellyfish

whose alpha male wins every sperm competition

and ends up transparent enough like death in life

*

“Annihilation of the self, unification of a whole” –

boasting so, hydrangea shines at night, while

a firework, fading out in the sky, whispers:

“If you cling to life, you’ll die all too soon”

*

The first time I saw a real urine glass bottle

I imagined the hoary me peeing into it,

pretending to spread my seed to the unknown –

does that mean misreading can be fertile?

26

Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation

A windpipe wonders what is choking it right now Death has never been so near me, it thinks

Far above it, someone is demanding from somebody else urgently Something like an acronym – AED? OED? ABC? OMG? – too distant to distinguish

A mighty right hand removes all the clothes

And puts itself on the lower part of the breastbone A left hand joins it and says: “Without us, this life is pathetically powerless”

The two hands intertwine each other and start to press the chest

While its own breathing weakens rapidly The windpipe feels something like a space junk flowing from the rest of the system And whispering: “No trust, no kibitzers – your enemies are your truest supporters”

The right hand infers that the sole culprit of the choke may be a grotesque bug

“You may eat,” the left hand says, “some insects that have wings and walk on four feet” “Leviticus?” The right hand chuckles, while stepping up the tempo of its pressing

The windpipe feels something like a seismic wave addressing it: “Every victim can surpass her victimizer only if she survives”

The windpipe thinks that the real culprit may be a clone made from its own cells

Or may have been washed up there, with foreign matter all over its surface By something overwhelming like a tsunami, after its yearlong travel in the whole body

“Without eating bugs,” the right hand says, “we humans cannot survive any longer”

“Lend me a help! Call an ambulance! Is anybody here?” A mouth shouts and Covers the other mouth with itself and blows odorous air into each vulgar alveolus The left hand slightly lowers the forehead, and the right one slightly raises the chin The windpipe senses something like a spaceship put finally into its destined orbit

A television’s voice announces nearby the oncoming disappearance of the whole Arctic

At last, one of the hands inserts its fingers into the gaping mouth To take out a foreign object resisting every imaginable creature comfort

Something apocryphal and unrepentant may come out of me, the windpipe suspects

The right hand says: “Caretakers like us need to help skillfully a patient’s storytelling” The left one says: “The most powerful storyteller is always the most powerless”

The right one says: “The most powerless can represent the love of the public best” Wondering if its own power may be impure, the dying windpipe misses all humanity

27

Leaving something like frottage here and there on the windpipe’s wall An amorphous poem drops out of the mouth and falls onto a puddle Its first line is: “Only when I’m seen, I exist and spin my own shroud”

But, before its second line shows, it disappears from the surface of the muddy water

28

Quatrains (Part 5)

Under a mug shot of an anti-government activist

who killed a few cops is a “My cat is missing” notice

No passers pay attention to any of them except

a Methuselah-like mendicant who doesn’t seem wanted

* Finally noticing that a genuine question is

the one without answers, an idiot returns

to his alma mater and, endlessly

kicks at its walls with tears in his eyes

* Fatigued with keeping up

the pretense to have no enemies

a lonely boy peels

an orange as if to crush it

* “After I die here, which part of me

will you gnash first, ants?” – to this merry echo

no clear answer remains to be heard

around an old monument to A-bomb victims

*

From the back of a slight body

whose softness has been already

shaved off, a black market’s heat

continues to slop around

*

29

A little girl blows soap bubbles in the hard rain

praying every one of them goes to the heaven

She wonders why they burst less than on a fine day

not knowing how many friends of hers are at-risk kids

*

A herd of the fanged drifting

on an animal trail is now

right on the sole threshold

in me, still indistinctly

*

Giving no assent to a voice

stressing the presence of truth

I trace a giant oval

across the void at night

*

A bouquet stands weakly

on a yet bloodstained

accident scene almost

like Miyazawa Kenji

(Note: Miyazawa Kenji is a Japanese poet and fairy-tale writer [1896-1933])

*

Artificiality of the concept of race

was run over again near my house

From a crevice of its pure-white belly

a parasite emerged but dried up shortly

30

Entomology Under a premonition of a threatening sky a deserted tomb of an unknown is staring at every silently-walking man and woman who may end up an unruly mob someday Under the tombstone with no inscription on it lies a small sarcophagus where nothing is buried but a piece of paper cut into pieces Who can restore perfectly the poem written on it

Trapped between a closed window and its screen a brownish male praying mantis

leaves all his company behind in a garden bush He plunged willfully into this narrow gap

Inexperienced in the texture of the screen he touches

for the first time, the mantis pauses There is something dignified about his sinewy body

His dark brown eyes look simply challenging and his thin legs seem unfathomably lonely

as if he has resigned himself to the fate of an eternal prisoner

Thunderheads start to overshadow the western sky

and to bring a shower to this town Months have passed silently since I volunteered to leave

my job to whittle myself into a better piece of work No revelation, however, has visited me and

a voice lamenting my misjudgment still swirls

The mantis braves the elements and throws his flat chest out high

with all his strength directing his ire to gusts whenever the screen convulses showing his wrath at the rains

whenever his view fogs He begins to dance quietly, as if to squeeze

everything out of himself to prove his worth

31

Shutting myself into this small tatami-mattress room

What kind of dance have I been performing until now I try to open the window to release him to the rainy garden

but the eyes of the mantis order me to close it again and a voice echoes

“My dancing days are not past yet ― let my solo go on” I nod to it and walk away from the closed pane

A young boy and his mother pause before the tomb He asks her why it stands in the middle of Main Street “Displaying the death of someone we don’t know like this is nonsense” – she says and suspects that the water oozing from this out-of-place tomb like a miracle is infected with hazardous wastes illegally disposed everywhere

in this city While walking away with his mother, the boy looks back again to say the last prayer and discovers an empty insect cage left on the very top of the tombstone and wonders why

on this rainy day