haiku 俳句

let in this morning

our kitten still tracks the dew

through cold wooden rooms

露の朝猫の足跡床に染み

walking the dry fields 

returning from the station

the year's first sun

初日の出 駅から歩く枯れ野原

in the tall grasses 

a boy collecting crickets – 

the hazy moon

少年は草にコオロギ朧月

is he still waiting

on the hill along Snake Pond –

the wind in the pines?

丘の上まだ松風に雄蛇ヶ池

(Appeared in Tinfish)

Three Senryu ・ 3川柳 ・ Lost in Translation

 

1.

The boy liked to roll in waves
filling his clothes with sand
and walk in spring rain

子の服が浪砂にまみれ雨遊ぶ

 2.

Crabgrass rising in my lawn,

the retired fireman smiles crossing the street

草茂る鎌持つあやじ暇の笑み 

3.

Behind the building the summer moon hides for the long windy night

風が吹くビルに隠れて月涼し

(Tacoma 2003; Tamsui 2012; photos by D. Brink; thanks to Prof. Horikoshi Kazuo for help polishing the Japanese versions)

Noir Respite from the Recovering City

D. Brink, 2007

A country boy has more time on his hands,
is used to a lull before a friend arrives,
but once the haggling gets going
the headache of it all again
pans out. Inside a week
he’s offering mother’s sandwiches
and his pulse falls to a whisper…
whatever he had to say folded in
the chiaroscuro of the whipping
action of a spatula
in - what drew Caravaggio
I’m sure - the heartrending drum roll
of being so close, almost welcome,
yet broken by encroaching said hinterlands
ever demanding, wilderness abutting
where wolves know when to wallow
in a varicose dawn where yakety-yak alarms
resurrect zombie video game mobs for the du jour
dangling off in pickup trucks down roads less traveled,
the whole kit and caboodle tuned to the conglomerate
as if nomadic time were a luxury
and we were never anywhere anyhow,
never taking a load off the dialectical day
of drifting into subsistence cage effects,
broadcasts inoculating the local grange,
fears bleeding into any film noir dolly or pally.

(Tacoma 2003; Tamsui 2012)

Feel Free to Splash about Disturbing Patience / 盡情揮霍不安的耐性

Flight Path, D. Brink, 2002

Feel Free to Splash about Disturbing Patience

Sorry to keep you waiting, I was feeding the neon tetras.
If I forget they cut loud swathes of blue
teasing anemone raising the seabed in your typical global warming nightmare
where fish end up on shore and no one can sleep at night over the stench.
Now it all boils down to handfuls of medlar berries and Astragalus roots
and they help, though when I go all the way with angelica sinensis
I get asked about the missing time in my dreams
and it gets messy keeping stories straight.
We stop pretending to care, anyways just gassing up
facilitates sky patterns subject to detection along I-5,
ground speeds added to sealed envelopes
one day to make the glossies
or break up grand programs to pay off buddies
not even yours. Yet still with the day-to-day
possibilities of stepping out of my sedan
like a scientist toward his white jumper suit
in an airlock from which he drives away in a turquoise electric golf cart
to a room now faraway from notions of home,
deep underground, past bio-scans
under cameras concentrating on the filtered and hygienic
machinery, our boys busy giving it their all
to avoid outsourcing, even shopping on faith.
The trick is in the theme music,
so phrases throw no one
before the package is packaged, keeping ‘em at it,
full in a barreling rhythm
so the inertia snares them as them
at its peak with everyone falling away on cue for the shift.


盡情揮霍不安的耐性

抱歉讓你久等了，我正在餵食霓虹魚
如果忘了餵，牠們將大幅擺動藍色的發光帶
捉弄海葵、掀起海床，在你典型的全球暖化夢魘裡
魚翻白肚上岸在惡臭的夜裡沒有人能夠入睡
總之，重要的是一把枸杞和少許當歸
它們改善了失眠，雖然以前我慣用黃耆
而且一再被問到夢中遺失的時光
故事呈直線發展卻越發混亂
我們不再假裝在意，反正先把油箱加滿
讓天空的圖案進入I-5道路沿線的偵測器
封緘的密函隨著地面速度而增加
有一天就要在八卦版面上爆料
或者摧毀偉大的計劃只為了回報拜把兄弟
他們甚至不是你的同夥，而我每一天依舊懷抱著
步出轎車的各種可能，像穿白色連身服的科學家走入防塵室
又開著天藍色的高爾夫球電動車離去
回到深藏於地底、不再有一絲家的味道的房間
通過重重過濾和衛生儀器的鏡頭
進行生物掃瞄，我們的男孩忙著付出他們的一切
免去任何外包，甚至符合信仰的購買行為
關鍵在於主題音樂
配合著每一樂句
在產品被包裝起來之前，一個都不遺漏
充盈在飛快的旋律之中
如此慣性就會誘使他們成為他們
當音樂漸入高峰轉換指令下達眾人隨即撤退

poem by Dean Brink 原文／包德樂 translation by Min-Jen Chiang 翻譯／江敏甄

For Ben Linder

Ben unicycling for peace

Ben, his best friend, Jim, and I shared a house just north of the University of Washington for a year in the early 80s. I learned a lot from him and really miss him even now. Since those days (Reagan years) when anyone who cared about social issues was considered strange, I haven’t given up. Today, to be American seems to mean giving up power to corporations, who have it; before Reagan, people still were loyal to people first. I try to maintain critical social consciousness and to act positively, as Ben did, to both entertain and better society. He taught me juggling, how to cook, and introduced me to many local groups and experiences with all varieties of leftist organizations in Seattle--from on-campus anti-draft and women’s organizations to anarchists far from the ivory tower. But most of all, by his courage, he taught me that life has meaning when we hold ideals of social justice that cannot be denied.

If you don't know Ben's story, in short: he was, by building small-scale hydroelectric dams in rural Nicaragua, helping people who didn't have electricity. He was a big supporter of the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua (who didn't trust Ben at first, being an American). Nicaragua had been ruled by a select minority of families who owned most of the land and made peasants of the people and hadn't even tried to develop the infrastructure of the country. Yet the Reagan Administration depicted Nicaragua as a "domino" in the Cold War, and even though Congress denied funding, Reagan's henchmen (Oliver North the most famous) went ahead (see Iran-Contra Scandal). A witness who visited the University of Washington after Ben's assassination had seen Ben's name on a CIA "hit list" about the time he was killed, point-blank, after being captured by the American-backed "freedom fighters" who were actually counter-democratic thugs who sold out to the Americans or wanted the old oligarchy back. Just weeks before, Ben had filed a motion in the US against the US government for funding the war. 

Ben in Nicaragua

For Ben Linder

The northern divide sponsors landed men
with gold chains and gloved hands,

men pitched high on pasted billboards
and armed like the brunt of old ships.

Worn rubber soles slip toeing salt lines,
shoddy reserves in the bush bare cartography.

Every maimed and limb-lost feather of justice
speaks to theaters of pressure, harbors mined

to pay the northern tax of goods
to pay off what is not ours or anyone's

but the fancy barking of stiff dogs,
the interruption of ball games,

fires shot in closed offices across borders.
To be nowhere is the safest measure,

and so we juggle and appear from behind
the fine gauze of fluttering flagless drapes.

Tacoma Tanka タコマ短歌

1

I remember

my Italian grandma

toward certain guests,

“I’m a coal miner’s daughter,

I am!” she would proudly say.

ある客に祖母が教える「炭鉱夫の娘だよ！」との思い出が好き

Aru kyaku ni sobo ga oshieru "tankōfu no musume da yo!" to no omoide ga suki

2

Lifting the manhole

and waving a flashlight down

the Old Town sewer,

the hired hand says, “Sure enough,

hand dug by Italians.”

古町の下水道見るワーカーが「やはりイタリア人で掘った」と

Furumachi no gesuidō miru wākā ga “yappari Itaria-jin de hotta” to

3

From the City

a mimeographed photo

of someone else’s

alley – “hedges overgrown,

our vehicles cannot enter.”

シティからの写真に別の人の路地「生垣茂りカーが通れぬ」

Shiti kara no shashin ni betsu no hito no roji "ikegaki shigeri kā ga tōrenu"

Global Positioning

But who orchestrates the murmuring
as we hear the pluck of a harp

and see it trigger a long line of bows
taking aim at the ambiance of flying ants

reaching the balcony in quiet droves
burning in delicate dangling hives.

Children speculate which came first:
"open sesame" or "Sesame Street"?

Adults calculate: to stop the rain runoff
that breeds the ants that fills the town

with swarms that seep into an auditorium
that fizzles them in its lamps — and suggest

simply call out the cymbals and bassoons
traffic stops in swoons — like the rain

its coming — call out the cellos
to choke the fog of it honking

until Bruce released the brakes
and you wonder if you're the only one

bananas for the way things were
before the precision in flicking French horns

and dangling trombones to make your soul feel
so grand it swims out with the oboes.

(Nov. 2012)

After Pressing All the Buttons the Boy Escapes the Elevator

We stop on every floor in cosmopolitan giggling
then pass through a card-operated gate,
a guard counting our beeps.
The wealth of data brings us closer
to rolling our own dice
awash in radiation.
Things we mention only in footnotes
are manacled to our ankles.
The lawyer says it's okay, raises the ante
to another level, land given away
after a meltdown in the highlands.

When we press each others' buttons
a viral version of ourselves ejects
in the tickling and marks time
like dogs parked center on sidewalk slabs
marching into infinity, their infinity.
Sure it's glorious to have 15 minutes
of gorgeous hair at just the angle
and chalked up to sheer nerve
(so beyond the physical of it).
Whatever gets picked up, bouquets of roses
or a best friend’s sister, until
a grudge sets in, objects steer into range
as if to die here. Gosh, I feel awful now —
why can't I leave it alone,
let things get tangled more
and trail along following leads
on a "dog on the run"?

Footnote to a Poem with an Allusion to Donald Trump

Not inclined to exhibit malice of any sort,
might one merely ask a hypothetical question:
what do these lines

… tipping back
in a world born to its station, a world across the street
in sunny Maine, where the neighbors, the Trumps,
said it was a pity the way the pecking order gets televised nowadays

in a memorial poem "The Shiga Hero" really mean?

Could the “pecking order” mean “the shouting order”
an apprenticing intern gets with a 12-step boss?

Might “gets televised” suggest how easily one may let go
of one’s good upbringing, sacrifice pleasantries
and be let go by families for one’s excessive obsession with power?

Might one take the threatening tone of “I’ll give you 5 million dollars if you…”
as serving people notice to service people?

Might even the high and mighty approach the danger zone
of becoming a caricature, a salable on a video shelf?

Such it would seem, and there are stories to tell
from the families and neighbors in the grand vacation enclaves of Maine.

Ah, indeed, it’s too late to ask, now, isn’t it, what you meant?
But one day, the paparazzi will ask said families
who then, themselves, must stoop to inquire of Ms Manners as follows:

Dear Ms Manners:

Terribly sorry to bother you when I know you must have so many less fortunate people trying to make do in our part-time service economy; however hard it must be for them to maintain a sense of dignity, I yet remain indeed inclined, I must say, and, still, terribly afraid, that I must bother you with my dire dilemma. It is a dilemma that has fallen on my shoulders and become the albatross of my waking hours. You see, my cousin, who I won’t mention by name, thinks he is better than others and can, so to speak, treat others with unkindnesses. It has been our way to at least pretend we are all equal, as people are all people (some in our circle would even include whales and porpoises, not to mention endangered breeds of pelicans and midget owls in upper Maine). So I write in earnest to beg your kind advice and ask this question: should I grant an interview with reporters that might save our family’s good name after being violated by such spiteful and insulting public spectacles, all in the name of placing the blind pursuit of profit before our innate caring spirit, and, dare I say, life itself? Or, should I mind my own business and hope that I haven’t shorn myself from my wealthy cousin’s will? Mind you, he is not much older than me, but dare I say the years have not treated him well. Thank you kindly for your sagacious wisdom.

Shocked and Awed in Kennebunkport

Dear Shocked and Awed in Kennebunkport,

Gentle Reader, Ms Manners appreciates the delicate nature of your dilemma. Every family has its wayward black sheep. It would seem an epidemic of such unwanted circumstances enters the menu of family discussions as so many of us find ourselves relying on the kindness of strangers, and family, in our worst slump since the 1930s.
Yet, I ask, does it not really come down to two old adages? First, “He who has suffer'd you to impose on him knows you.” Consider tolerating the antics of your cousin as an exercise in self-growth; you learn about not only your cousin, but life’s extremes. The more the world is debased, the more we all learn. The other proverb which comes to mind is “Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.” By that Ms Manners wonders why you would shy away from your ethical calling.

Edge of the City

Waves collapse, corral batten down.
Ladders crisscross toward the clear
clouds touched off at the cliffs.
Hearsay lowers the bar, allowing nets
to overwork their stasis.
Prophecies close a word at a time
but never come to pass.
A toddler loves stalking the kitten.
At feeding time it hisses.
A chameleon turns to stone.
Ants deliver, roaches devour.
Rivers flush storms flown inland –
waters rise – towns are swept aside.
Under the looping sun
banyan trees dangle roots
thickening as they touch down
in the dying grass.

Unterbewusstsein*

The coma of hunger
dwells in far interior
automata, alone
muscling no milk
down in fists

stop it!

No one speaks to
the enculturation
as planes overtake their shadows
now forced and forever close to the floor.

Swallowed gurgles — a start —
swallowed air — helpless —
a body backs up —
— a good boy
swallowing — milk —

stop!
— a voice —

to each swallow whooshing
faraway — whooshing, crashing
in all directions

an absent trick

only brokered days — of silence

— and sanctions
turning into years

— until let go —
landscapes filled
our painting-poems
with slimy things
upon the slimy things —

and that was that —

salesmen gave up
on making us more American.

The surroundings adjusted,
and — the swallowing subsided.

Yet writings of the dead left no doubt:
no strangers to narrow escapes,
the swallowing fills our ears —
even today — faraway —

seeing past our partings —
and betrayals — letting go
the interchange of fire
and floods and love of the land.

*German for "the part of a person not under the brain's control."

Fantasy Nature Assemblage

Leaves of grass map dry mudflats,
openings for worms to take chances
to grow like grass, waiting for rain
to return them swimmingly
and fishing girls to pick them
from thin puddles and lay them
twisting in plastic tubs.
Who would ask the girls about
the glamorous aura of worms
or list the shapes of haloes
once documenting stone faces?

To love the earth from the depths of its thinginess
entails not just hunger but humor:
as the hungry cows moo to the girls
in late summer fields
the Dachshund moos to us.
So we lead each other to go see
jets mirrored to sluice willy-nilly cloudbursts
dropping home in parables of love
and dropping darkness and lightning at destinations.

Blackouts pass in intervals.
Transportation is at a premium.
Clouds give way to rain and grain,
grain is compacted, steer hooves
clamoring out of the closing bullet
a ballet, for which we are always late
as in the alliance of pollywogs
pointing cutely to true north.

(October 2012)

Remembrances of Our Place

Like the god lying down in the mountain
hand rising at the watery horizon
and the baritone gaining control
of several operatic languages
I want to drive, no longer driven
as a lost boy not to stray, under cover, borrowed cover
calling like sin to throttle my hippocampus
so busy not to sort the chaff and coincidence.

Faraway, nature has a field day with reverse psychology--
fertile entanglements fill a matrix
at closing time no longer welcome to go home
without coats and tails unraveling
and always longer half-lives
set out to test one's mettle to love the land,
to put up and leave handles for branded vandals,
or shut up, pissing on sand castles.

Military Industry: A Child Can Make Mustard Gas

As boys we did our best
to live up to the president’s
idea of going to the moon,
pooling our chemistry sets
and toolkits, borrowing
the kitchen helmet
and books from aunts
with drafted brothers
while the West Coast
learned to get high
in horned-rimmed glasses
and the rest of the country
waited for California
to slide into the Pacific.

So many Greek syllables on the way to the stars,
calculus ifs spinning out escape velocities
prone to variable entangled radiance, quanta
in elongated shadows for every action
a shadow action, the gist always close at hand

in the Bunsen burner’s feeble, steady hope
we took our cue to fold equal parts
sulfur and iron filings over a rising blue glow
enveloping so that it separated into stages,
pellets to stash away in test tubes
while we concentrated hydrochloric acid
following the formula for century gases
in the World Book Encyclopedia.

(Tacoma 2000)

Home

Here on the peninsula letting one’s hair down
has its own apotheosis,

part of a communal unconsciousness bridging Parmenides and Jung
with Rosa Luxemburg’s fashionable visit to escape commodity fetishism

and beat one’s own laundry on stones again—
time slows long enough to dry and to try to find time to dawdle

naked in shallows, as the sight in a movie
of a dugout canoe filled with red feathers.

Just rattling on about it will do the trick, staging more
with candles and incense, honoring not one or a few gods,

but anything that holds a tune,
even in pentatonic scales that seem to have holes in them.

dimes sent spinning undermine conversation. Word of mouth
does not alleviate the gaps, will not reinvent history,

a process—yes, a oneness—no. As if it were more sincere
to keep noses to grindstones found with us one day,

like the comfortable queen-sized bed
your friends have always dreamed you of having,

more impetus to work, go west or east
to seed in the open air of the internet,

planting roots, flashing lights in the landscape
of all the rules attuned to and invented

as we go along watching the turning of leaves,
trespassing forward from fuzzy beginnings.

(Tacoma 2003)

川柳: 階段をねちねちステップダンス好き

階段をねちねちステップダンス好き

(lit. tr.: Nagging about the stairs while liking to step dance)

‘Scientists Say Fukushima Cause of Mutant Butterflies’

‘Scientists say Fukushima cause of mutant butterflies’
symbols of imperial office, not the person
as in 1881 song No. 17, sung to ‘Lightly Row’ and ‘Hänschen Klein,’

‘Butterflies, butterflies, stop on the rappini,
if you tire of rappini blossoms, move on to the cherry

as half lives round down over time
bob up and down in any weather

and stay in the cherries in the glorious reign
stay and play, stay a moment to play’

hide-and-seek, categorically spring—
eluding seasons in any weather
wings flop the butterfly and drop.

Time to change the soil on land and shore,
as time marches forward
pushing celestial light, holding
changing the soil and water of the earth
to carry on as if again as if
the bottom will fall through as if
again, in magic puffs butterflies rise
again in lovely songs and multitudinous--
modern, blown by the wind
quietly mutating what shadows and stays,
waiting for a voice to say we are real still
no longer sewn to our hiding as one
under a great hand or song.

Who would trade the earth, air and water
for the solvency of a few, a handful of expedience?
If we cannot plant our spinach and tomatoes
we’ll read by kerosene. What refugees in the Northeast
would turn to turn their cesium to the poisoned earth,
would dare blame themselves than speak out
gathering a new category of butterfly and spring?

Note: Reading many “current events senryū” (satirical haiku on social themes) from the major newspapers in Japan (Asahi shinbun, Mainichi shinbun, and Yomiuri shinbun), following the sentiments expressed in the verse I became quite disturbed by what appeared in the news and poetry to be a joint corporate-government stonewalling as well as deadly ineptitude in the handling the nuclear crisis. Given how neoliberalism renders new norms of thinking by which it offers amoral and by common standards unethical parameters of judgment—based purely on values expressed in mottos such as “profits are all that matters” which is justified by “the free market forces solve all problems” with leads to privatization and the shift from a democracy to a corporate oligarchy—such corporate-government indifference even to human lives is not totally unexpected, though still shocking. Obviously, the expense of shoring up the Fukushima reactors, known to be threatened by tsumani, was deemed unprofitable, and the delusional fiction propagated by nuclear energy companies seems to have led in the case of TEPCO to an actual belief in their own propaganda that there could be no problem, no contingencies for worst-case scenarios, even after 3/11. Of course planning for non-profitable contingencies such as tsunami, which are not uncommon, was not their only mistake. Information about radioactivity was kept from the public as if they were expendable. As Alain Badiou (whose work inspired this poem) might argue: the people of Japan are now inexistants when confronted with the nuclear power corporations alliance with governments in Japan. Of course, to assert their existence as Japanese is possible (as in the recent weekly demonstrations): continue the categorical play and enjoy losing oneself in the alignment of fashion discourse and the latest gadgetry with being a consumer, or to stand up for the people of not only Fukushima but Japan as a whole, and follow as Germany (but with even better reasons) a non-nuclear power policy to match the non-nuclear proliferation policy. I have lived in Japan many years in the past, and still feel it is my second home after Taiwan. This issue seems very important (enough to wake me from my blogmatic slumbers).

Human—Nature

Society gentry unload Great Danes
for a bite at the designer doggie bakery
in the heart of homeless Pioneer Square—
palaces of neon toys and metered movies
zoning would push off into the sticks
while Seattle busies with aerobics to see
how the next rows of shoulders turn out.

After the crackdown we ditch the hotties
and eat alone, waiting
unless you can tell the mayor
to her televised face
you miss discount aerosol spray
dripping buffoonishly in obscene alleys.

Gaudy signatures remind one of the virtue of humility
lest the animals wandering in us
creep out the girl walking in those guys

while those others mark up the map
like new breeds of deeds and trust by bus line.

One only wishes, while the open garden makes open rebellion futile,
for every lovely girl we’ll find a boy who’s nubile.

And while half of what we say is half empty
half the salmon are half up river for nothing

and for every island lost to global warming
somewhere higher another McDonald’s is forming.

So we summon shaman to police the perimeter—
and say Sorry! What we’ve done to our earth is shoddy . . .

and go on sewing echoes to empty bodies,
the friendly market waiting at an undisclosed singularity

ready to upload with just a finger,
while in accord with the committee,

we remain calm, left to linger.