Kokinshū

I'm shown a
bored woman. The shower
is the author of
a history that tears
my books in
slashed-up sections and the
enemy of the naturally evening
force of time. The woman is a
burner of offerings, a prayer
to gods of refinement, to
the gods of her elegant commune,
gods who celebrate this present beauty to
forget the future. The entrance
of disintegration into the world is
not yet come, and without
its vivifying presence, the
sense of things is towed out to sea, and the tower
is the endless stream of
dull daily existence and its content:
short poems, useless sleeves, gossip that leaves all agape.
The carefully chosen words that she
weaves, cut off from the warmth of the chanson and the lied,
the passion and
primitiveness of the
later world, are string she winds
endlessly into a ball, a buffet
of ephemeral delicacies, and time, the severer,
severs the string, more inevitable than
death. The era is a
task completed; the string is wound.
All is swept into the
rain-swelled sewer.
What can be said of
a people whose lives were mere recreation?
No trace of them remains, except for
coldly crafted words, the
children of sweets and sake,
and stylized representations of
dead persons that leave the
viewer lonely and invalid.