Masayo Koike Poems

When we returned from the trip
His
Face indicated that something had ended
The trip had
Indisputably ended
The journey's end encroached on
Numerous other things that
Seemed to be approaching numerous endings
Let's go on another trip,
Let's come back to Italy again,
Chatting like this at the end of the journey
Somewhere deep deep within us
Something had already ended between us
For sometime afterwards we remained within the ending but
One day suddenly he began to talk
I think we should separate
At these words
For the first time a feeling that something was amiss grew in me
Yet for a long long time
I too lived within the ending
An ending at the time that
When I ended it
I felt
That there ought be a new beginning
Between him and me
Being eaten away by our ending
Even things around us one by one crumbled
The oven telephone fridge printer
Glasses all broke, even the window pane broke
The ending of everything continued
Almost new, refreshing
All the endings
Fell around me and collected like snow
...

Rain fell in a mass
A body of rain but it was not noisy
Rain, so called collectively
Disjoined drops of water
They call ‘fall', in the midst of a furious journey
Led by an outside force called gravity
The life of rain overtakes with speed alone
The brevity of its journey to earth
In eyelines watching rain
A silent drop of rain stops
In a twinkling of the eye the speed of life
Always invisible fixed
Cannot be overtaken no matter at what speed
That indeed
Is the core of life
Glittering
Stopping at a strange height
The drop itself not wet in the least
Stares at the life of rain
...

The girl who takes a dose of youthful souls
Who doesn't bow is still effective

The end of summer
In the middle of the road
Lying on its back dead a Brown Baker cicada

In the aunt's folded fan
Jammed within this year's butterfly is dead

In the tobacconist at the bottom of the slope
Not moving an inch the perpectual shop assistant

Children gleam
Fish or skylarks
Sped off in the direction of the sea-tang

In the forlorn, tiny universe dog dung remains

The power of green binds the window
All the trees silently burst into flame
Z, zzz, zzzz
Buzzing green

Afternoon in the locked music room
A strange chord can be heard

On top of the piano
The ashtray and the girl
Matches and a bundle of small candles

‘Take off your socks'
‘Keep your skirt on'

The girl's legs are slowly opened
In the inlet giddy students in the grade above

Looking from afar another girl
This summer
Binds all their pasts together
Travelling behind them

From tomorrow all will begin their end
...

Nothing captured Hakozaki Ichirô's heart as much as deep blue flowers

One day
When he was waiting in front of the station for a friend
By chance his eye fell upon a nearby flower bed
There quite by accident
A mass of small blue flowers was growing
His line of vision
As if harvested by a vacuum cleaner was sucked into it
Hakozaki could not understand what had happened

Blue
Pierced Hakozaki's mucus membranes
Like an overflowing river it
Encroached upon his interior
Without exception every word that he possessed was drowned
After the profound silence only an exclamation mark
Was hoisted up like a small fish

Ah,
How deep was the blue,
Thought Hakozaki

It was at that time when he was assailed by a sharp grief
That made him want to weep loudly
There was no reason for this grief
In front of the station like this
He thought I should not break into tears all of a sudden
The self that Hakozaki had
Stifled firmly now
Turned him into
A newborn baby

Blue flowers the first thing the baby had seen since its birth

This was an instantaneous
Movement of emotion, an impulse
Far away from that thing called passion Hakozaki
Had never been as shocked by his own actions as then

It was only a colour
It was only blue

But Hakozaki was distraught
In his chest
There was a tightness
He felt as if he wanted to dive into the flowers
It was truly
That he was in love with the flowers, exactly that

‘Hakozaki, sorry for being late'
According to his friend who had said this, and then tapped him on the shoulder from behind
Hakozaki at that time
With a somewhat contorted face
Appeared to be saying something about blue flowers
In fact
It was the behaviour of a
Completely helpless baby

The sequel -

1 What befell Hakozaki after that I don't know.

2 When Asians are newborn a blue spot appears near their buttocks. It's a very pale blue mark like paint dissolved in water. We have blue in our bodies from the beginning.
When I was a child, on the lymphatic glands on my groin I had an almond-shaped blue spot. In the bath I used to compare mine with my little sister's. In colour and appearance my little sister's blue spot was slightly different. Now I can't find it anywhere, I wonder when, where and how it disappeared?

3 Once I used to stare feverishly at a blue convolvulus in my garden and I felt as if I was peeking at someone's crotch. Plant life revolves like a screw and bores into the depth of the life of the person who is observing it.

Like Hakozaki I also went into ecstasy over the blue convolvulus. This Western convolvulus had a warm yellow in its center. Around the centre there was an expanse of sad blue, inexpressively elegant and profound, while I was staring at it I felt consumed by the desire to plunge into the centre of convolvulus. The desire to plunge to one's death into the centre of the flower, a deep longing for blue, was this not the original expression of the emotion that drove many young people to travel?

4 At school the teacher used to say blue is for boys and pink is for girls. I hate the notion of dividing things up like this. When I looked around, everything - the sewing boxes, the calligraphy tools - was like this. But I don't like pink. As soon as I realized this, my mind was made up. I realized that amongst all the girls in the class, my sewing box was the only blue one.

Blue - you were the colour of my first modest resistance, for me who is a girl, you were a truly noble colour that gave me the first whiff of freedom.

5 Aren't I Hakozaki? Isn't Hakozaki me? We love blue.
A tanka poet, a youth who I met yesterday talked about Izumi Shikibu with a bead of sweat on the tip of his nose
‘Remembering you . . .
The fireflies of this marsh
seem like sparks
that rise
from my body's longing'*
In the white of the boy's eye there was a faint touch of blue.
...

The small alley
Glimpsed from a fast train
I wonder where it goes?
Perhaps
In my whole life
In this alley where I shall never enter
There
People who I will never brush against
A row of dwellings that I will never see
Fish cooking I will never smell
One by one
All these impossible things lined up beside each other
Then, suddenly, vividly
With a feeling of familiarity stronger than towards any other path
This single alley rises up before me
Now
It's accompanied by a sure sadness
That I am intimate with.
There myself turning my back standing
Going down the alley slope
Chasing the setting sun
Crossing bridge after bridge
Rapidly disappearing, growing smaller myself
Finally from the end of the alley in which I find myself
The cry of a newborn baby as if a lid has been removed
A hot July day
The day on which I was born
Sprinkled water glistens on the road
...

I have few friends
Among my few friends Miss Jôgasaki
Liked bright, easy to understand
Flowers like gerberas
She had no dark side
I am not Mino Monta* but
No matter how old she got
I wanted to call her ‘young lady'
Once in our workplace many of us played a game of depth psychology
fortune-telling
Each item had a picture and a question and you had to write a simple
comment and answer
Later the meanings of the pictures were revealed
For example, the number of flowers indicated the number of future
children one might have
It was just a stupid game but all of a sudden everyone got excited
Normally she stood apart from others and was a quiet, still person but
Unexpectedly she joined in the game

And
One of the items
Had the words
‘I want to do it' attached
This was hidden from the group but
It was actually an item measuring one's sex drive
When this was revealed
Miss Jôgasaki cast her eyes down completely lost her presence of mind
and grew horribly embarrassed
We felt as if we had committed a terrible sin

Miss Jôgasaki died soon after from uterine cancer
I suppose she was a few years over forty
She remained single and never suffered in her life so
She always looked no more than twenty-five

Sometimes
Her words come to me
In a casual way as if someone had forgotten a delivery
Again and again as if her words were not quite there
From the other world
They lightly arrive ah, they've come, then, when I am quiet
Like potato starch dissolving in water
The grief slowly settles at the bottom
I know that the surface of this world grows more and more transparent
I too with my eyes downcast
Fervently
Wait
For something to pass through me
...

The Kaneko Gym on the Odakyû Railway Line is
A small
Boxing gym
At night
From inside the train
I can see people training in the Kaneko Gym
Young men boxing
Within the black night
Blossom-Pink muscles
Like cherry blossoms sweating silently
Boxing, in their movements
A stray memory comes to mind
A memory I seem to have had
Can't say for certain
‘Kaneko Gym, new boxers welcome'
This is
Always
Read silently
By those with heavy sodden hearts
They
All
Open the dark door
And
One after
Another
Have gathered
There
...

Above our heads
A star fell
A strong bluish star

Like the moment when for the first time
A man uses his instrument dripping with ink
The star swiftly disappears a blur into the sky

During then
All we could do was
To forget to wish
Just surprised, as if for the first time

The night air as if enveloping in a sphere
The void after it was lost to sight

(Among the night trees a solemn sound grown by the rhythm)

Ah, what a
Daring wheel-track traced by the star!

It was
Like a stake silently driven into us
Remain on the earth and live!
Live, said the star!
...

The big elm tree shaken gracefully by the
Small birds all together who
Landed on the
Snow-covered path

Big drops of happiness scattered from heaven
Like anger
Beat against
The soft muddy earth

Our breasts are full

Still a little
Weak but
The barbarian complex light from the sun
Birds the weight of small lemons
Gather
Disperse
Again gather

The mighty grip that grasps and releases
Works on the land in Spring

Woman,
Vividly,
On the surface of the water intuition describes the shape of a soul
...

‘I know where a waterfall is'
Said the mountain man
His eyes were without doubt
Eyes that knew where the waterfall was

But this was
Not something that he could teach others by opening a map
With silence folded
Inside the mountain man
For many years and months
‘I know where a waterfall is.'
When he said this for the first time
Together with the sound of water splashing
A calm wisdom overflowed to the outside

Those who heard this no matter who
Recalled themselves travelling far away
Seeking for water

There was no one to ask, ‘where?'
There is a waterfall -
As if it is enough just to hope that there is a waterfall
Travellers raise their heavy bodies
And set out on the path to the waterfall
One by one, each
Heading in a completely different direction
...