Pointillist Roundup at the Changing of Guard

Whispers raise the wall on nostalgia,

retrofit a preemptive uplift for a latte,

lead-ins ticking off a lonely pensioner

depending on one nice Joe. A step

on the tube in the wrong election

paints the town a lost-cause sauvignon.

Handfuls of Velveeta gather behind a church 

a hundred times I won’t, I will, just short

of detritus standing out of class

to write his name a hundred times, no matter

broken enough. We return to a bulletin
of tunas fished to the seed of death.

The sushi, from a long line of Secretariats,
is finely marbled and fresh from a local corral

at least until the Petri chicken is flown in.

May I recommend a man or a woman, but hey, it’s your life.

Nouveau riche penguins drag nature and are taken.

Birds and bees also have tools

and microtransmitters. Possums are marching north,

leave little wind-ups on the back porch.

Live at the Enclave

The broad notes of Brahms braid a new age drone.

Cameras arrive with miner’s lights mining us for numbers

and panning grey bricks with names on walls and walks.

Smiles spread with light rounds of applause.

It’s the same story recorded in immaculate times

before the rise of timetables and the collapse of markets,

the ocean as we knew it, always readying for the tap

of every quake or storm flood to break our bananas and oranges.

Nothing irks us who knew better, not even some other us

a step ahead, almost vegan. But hungry buddies arrive

and want us to come around to seconds on the fowl

as long as the sea and sun will support the ritual.

Even in all the sunlight they worried about who’ll arrive

at the beachheads asking for handouts at every doorstep,

sailing so far from so many language groups

urged to bypass coral closures and volcanic chaos offshore,

leaving the rest ready to divvy up what’s left all over again

before it all ended, as if time swelled as we retreated

with mountains full of mountain peoples waiting to lend a hand.

Angry Beachcomber

Sunday we scanned shores for traces of foreign lands
as if over the horizon driftwood from Africa would arrive
marble and immovable, but fragrant
while birch would dissolve just days from Sakhalin
and soft fir from across the Pacific bring only bad news,
splintering with salts and barnacles.

All the shapes we bring home we can lean together into a lean-to
for cooling off in some shade, nap in the curves
and cure the tough turns of the day.

It has been a hard year of bursting onto shores
and no one understands true art, especially our driftwood,
leaving us rather starkly high on our horses
like statues of dead dictators quaintly marching off into woods
kept growing around them. The city is encircled now, all of them sent off
on the lookout. I'm sure my quiet voice is part of the problem—
how else to explain outbursts ruining days
and with elders there, not up to fretting anymore,
just letting the world go in tides of its own
to survey with a usual doctoring of salt.

Nov. 2007, Hualian

Anecdote of a Fable

by Antje Kaiser, my mother, missed dearly

[Note: this poem is from 2006.]

I keep telling my dates I’m looking for love

but the more I look the more I doubt it.

It’s nice to rest my head on a living pillow

but as contacts multiply

my aunt reminds me of my Mercury Moon,

how an aura of Medieval toads

is nothing to drop my guard for

for any princess as when I refilled my barbecue

along Tacoma Avenue—hands, face dotted with warts. 

No matter, I used the pen handed me

not to make anyone feel funny.

I’d asked for it, with a vague idea of joining the fun,

getting in with others into changing their own oil

and heading for the hills to get blasted, if not

busted, together forgetting we were ever there in the dream.

I dome the wart each morning in salicylic solution

softening it in remembrance of walls let to collapse

in the humidity that makes us sultry, a city of April

improved, new sunset tints on the cheeks.

The drops show it who’s boss, but one morning

it drains too easily and one wonders

if the cure shuttled too deep—to the point of poison,

riveting viewers while all proceeded on schedule

from the time we wrapped ourselves as boys

around ropes climbing up to whatever gymnasium ceiling

someone pointed to, just to see

how small the eye holding the rope was

up above the empty bleachers, inching higher

into the victory lights, unstoppable cheers from buddies

falling in line with the peering geometry

of windows painted in local sponsors

mirrored on T-shirts, gathering below,

panting on each others’ shoulders.

 (Tacoma, Washington; June, 2006)

3 haiku / 3 俳句

1

To see the sea neighbors fell all the old trees—the chestnuts!

ビューの為皆古木切り栗の実や

2

A litter of possums in circles groping in the last snow

雪の果てふくろねずみの子が模索

3

The scent—wiping tables—
the waitress leaves a fern

食卓を拭き羊歯を置き娘香や

(Tacoma 2003; Tamsui 2012; photos by D. Brink; many thanks to Prof. Horikoshi Kazuo for comments on earlier versions of the Japanese variations)

Fish Folds

The salmon run turns

on a limb of the Pacific

remote missions trailing

great harvesting nets

sluicing sea spittle,

sonar battens down

pound for pound

blip for blip

national hatcheries spawn

stakes for lawmakers

to rush cutters

until it's in the numbers

for towns marked by tarred pilings

barnacled green gray freighters

to lay up docks

sealed in tetanus

let shore fall to tides

air sift through to fish

graceful in a slow count

coursing in locked arcs

metallic buoyant bodies.

(Originally appeared in Columbia Poetry Review)

Found Roses

You wonder whether I even noticed

the five holes in the flower beds

about the time you brought over some house plants.

I didn’t want to see them

as more than more possum’s undertaking

stirring fusty leaves from the crusts around rhododendrons

and ferns mom found in the woods.

You love to say, she loved her roses, just like oma.

There are others. Deer from the ravine

bit off last year’s first blossoms just blooming,

even the attic squirrels skitter down the lilac tree

into freshly planted myoga, growing well in bricked-in bog.

The shade between houses lets fungi get a leg up—

one year pruned too close—more than it could pull through

in a rainy year; dry summers are too late,

the cherry covered in ants and we

set a trap for the gnawing in the rafters.

If I catch a squirrel how many seeds from the garden

will sprout up in its new woods somewhere south?

If you’d just asked for starters from roses or any

of the others, how proud, how we were sharing. 

(Originally appeared in Crab Creek Review)

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"?