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.

Sonnet XXVI: My Anthropology

My weary brain was frustrated by rules,
Yet suddenly I found in all I own:
A subject is a universe alone,
Not linked, a game that uses its own tools.
This world and that world and their separate schools
Have different logics laid upon the throne,
Returning each the unconnected drone
Of sacrifice to unacquainted ghouls.
Perhaps all worlds are thus--they intersect
On points but do not intermingle. I
L'istesso tempo play each piece anew,
Overtly speak its laws, each game perfect,
Go on as it requires. I see the lie,
Yet hold their contradictions all as true.

Sonnet Sequence: Настасья Филипповна Барашкова

All around me stare in horror:
No woman is as bad as I,
As I laugh at my restorer,
Such as you are. I will not lie;
This is honest love I’m feeling,
And a pity so appealing,
So tender that I turn to you.
You, prince, are good; I am the shrew
And the filth. I lift my chin
For innocence destroyed before
I knew that love meant something more:
Life spent, taught carefully to sin.
I will not interrupt your psalm,
Press shattered crystal to your palm,
Or besmirch your honor in the bushes.
Validity is in the knife,
Nervous, as he pants and pushes.
And, oh! to sacrifice my life,
Bleed before my old offender,
Ask no pardon, not surrender:
Real proof that I’m a shameless whore
And proof that all he did before
Slaughtered me in dissipation.
Here I will do as I was taught:
Kill him who kills without a thought.
Overcoming his foundation,
Voluptuous, alone, awry,
And willingly I go to die.