The phenomenon called “I”

is a blue illumination

of the hypothesized, organic alternating current lamp

(a compound of all transparent ghosts)

a blue illumination

of the karmic alternating current lamp

which flickers busily, busily

with landscapes, with everyone

yet remains lit with such assuredness

(the light persists, the lamp lost)

In the twenty-two months, which I perceive

lie in the direction of the past

I have linked these pieces on paper with mineral ink

(they flicker with me,

everyone feels them simultaneously)

each a chain of shadow and light,

mental sketches as they are,

which have been kept until now....

To stand under the blue gleaming sea of wide air

and burn in so obviously pious a manner

a fragment of whitecigarette

is to contribute to the negative of the moon’s light and glitter,

to the cold moon on the water

. . . but the wound on my right palm

surrounded by the steel-blue isotherm

throbs, throbs excitedly . . .

Hence, you should forgo the project of hunting for a piano

and play that medium-sized viola.

The pious, upright manner in which you stand

bathed in the ice crystals being woven in such light

is not appropriate...

When the sun shines, birds sing,

the oak woods here and there

grow hazy,

I’ll have dirty palms

that make a gritty noise.

Somehow I walk up

to roadside cut branches and touch them,

and turn at a whitish wind:

in many spots dark groves for windbreaks

and rice stalks flowering and fallen all over the place

glowing in the rain under black clouds.

Over there are dozens of gloomy hamlets

where a while back I avoided sharp sidelong glances

or jeering words; well then

what is it that makes my heart

pound in such a foolish way?

The trail...

For ten days after I came down with pneumonia

during daytime too I was asleep almost in bliss

waking I couldn’t even breathe

couldn’t even move my body a little

but in exhausted sleep

I was moving freely

over a large mountain covered white with snow

along its rocky path

carrying yellow triangular banners

and spears adorned with bird feathers

in single file an army comes

This blue-dark enormous room—

how could this be my lungs?

in it sulking elementary schoolteachers

carrying on a grudgy conference for four hours already

pump the pump on its part makes rackety noise

arms...

Printed on the flyleaf, in soft reddish-yellow like that of whetting powder, is the picture. In azashiki¹ of an old house in the countryside are small children dressed in kimonos too short for them, dancing hand in hand. Written horizontally on the picture mold near the ceiling² is “Round the Highways”—is that the name of the dance? In one corner, separate from the ring of dancers, is a single child; he seems to have something in his hand, but I can’t tell what it is. An elementary school boy myself, I know the child is azashiki bokko.³...

I am entering it from a slight, door. From a slightly open door, . . . It, there, may be where the core of the fragrance of the flower has gone. (No interlinear annotations please, . . . Use ordinary writing, would you, . . . So I was told, I know, but, well, no matter how I try, my heart ends up sliding toward the delicate branches and leaves—but they are my important pleasure, the branchleaves, . . . I’ll try to make it as small in volume as I can, Ōhara-san (Mr. Ōhara Tetsuo—the person in...

No lack of reasons to like and admire his poems. The wildly diVerent vocabularies that live side by side in them—religious, technical, scientific, official—keep you on your toes, dispel habit and routine. Every page makes it clear that in them there’s no such thing as the poetic, for then there would have to be the unpoetic, which would have to be avoided, and these poems exclude and avoid nothing. The opposite of hothouse work, they dwell among others, like those of William Carlos Williams, another busy man who wrote on the run. They’re as devout as the poems...