Pine Garden | Waste Land

Pine Garden

(Songyuan Bieguan, Hualien)

The weeds awakening in the eaves

Raising     their     bodies

Like a full set of milk teeth

Inside the dewdrops     on their stems     and leaves     are microorganisms

Living in balloon-shaped worlds

Advance and retreat,     predation and fission,     oh

Asphyxia and extinction,     falling,     shelter from the rain,     see

On their way to decay beneath the eaves

Next to the image on the screen, a cup of tea

Disintegrating life,

Disintegrating     L     I    V     E     S—

The polar ice melts,

Drowning polar bears unable to climb up

Atop a palm of sand, civilians

Are shot and fall so casually

(Is it real, the image on the screen?)

A cheap nightscape, unelectrifying

A cooking show (1 tsp of salt)

Discount pillows     a blinking tower     weather forecasts

(Is it real?)

Screen images pile up one on top of another

Canceling each other out into     mammals

Into their single pair of eyes

Today’s eyedrops are applied so that time

Is shaken, stretched against the background

A full set of     mammals

Living in the balloon-shaped world

Pine trees grow

Pine trees grow here

Scores of them grow here

Pine needles relentlessly prick

The waxing moon     to wound

The moon keeps its eyes shut while

Silently tracking today’s passage

Secretly infiltrating time’s membrane

(They were all planted by the Japanese, you know)

(Originally, pines didn’t grow around here)

(No use trying to read it, a wound is a wound)

A pine forest does not require translation

I think of some semblance of tomorrow

Something yet to come, hereafter

Is growing     here

Pine trees are growing     here

Their backs are curved, tenaciously caressed by the wind’s hands

Their heads cocked at the changing times

Their grudges shoved beneath their bark

They wound the passing moon

They shed yellow tears of resin while

Raising     their     bodies

The eaves     draw a line in the sky

Creating a tentative boundary in the field of vision

Which one bat of an eye

Would be able to     smash

If the numerous dewdrops

Would magnify the world at hand

Ringing each one of them

Predation and fission     asphyxia and extinction     birth

A full set of mammals     a balloon-shaped world

The words that didn’t get across would stick to the branches

Winding,     wriggling,     crumpling

And then come loose      blown away

Green needles’     wet, shiny tips

Touch the invisible membrane (yes)

A tug and a firm stab (oh)

Spills out     from inside (see)

Time piles up furiously

*Pine Garden in Hualien was built in 1942 during Taiwan’s colonial era by the Japanese Imperial Army. Its garden has Pinus luchuensis from Okinawa and its building functioned as an office and a retreat for army officers.

Wasteland

It’s frosty out there      a bit of ice

A puff of breath on the window and a finger

Squeegees across, opening up a space-time

In the shape of an embryo

Crossbreeding      meadow      headwind

Lined up at our toes are

Nothing but networks all new thus dearly familiar

Beyond our first step, a widening stretch

Drives us mad as if we had

Drawn the answer today

Drawn the final answer

On the map we gained by losing

Lunch boxes are spread chilly

Carrots follow haricot beans

Sprinkled over the fried chicken is a tearful of

Ocean, a constant tide from way back

Hybridizing one after another,

Genetic indigeneity is sucked into

The mesh and disappears

Until tranquility      like death      remains

Still, you argue

Tell me then, what are you longing for?

Waste land is misread for fertile land

To read waste land as fertile land

Waste land is misread, for fertile land

To read waste land, as fertile land

Afraid of losing, we hoard

Though    we    cannot    own    anything

Without limbs      we were lying about

Eating leaves in the dim light

They definitely came down from far above,

But from Heaven or through an intermediary,

We cannot tell anymore

Eating,      rolling around,      sometimes crawling,

We cannot avoid encounters

We step on the same spot and mate

We are all nothing but sexual beings

Therefore      we      mate      endlessly

The commanding finger is invisible

After carrot, lotus root, then homo erectus

Beans mate, pressed between the tips of chopsticks,

Spinning threads heedlessly,    spinning,

The city becomes a cocoon

We are all on the same ride by coincidence

Like so, we squeeze our bodies into seats

Until we each stand up at our will

(But what is will, anyway?)

From the depth of gene’s river, someone from 30,000 years ago stares back

What a taste of crossbreeding up to that point

Indivisible once incorporated, the pallet of

Hybridization is crowded

Exhausted sighs    and    prismatic sighs    brush past each other

Waste land is misread, for fertile land

To read waste land, as fertile land

To read waste land as fertile land

Waste land, misread, fertile land

Waste land

Everything poured into this narrow space-time

That we shall name Today

We take it out,      into the open,      unchained,

We exchange greetings with what approaches from ahead

It’s becoming dense

The smoke is becoming dense

We exchange howls before we find each other

From 顔をあらう水. Tokyo: 思潮社 (Shichōsha), 2015.

Image by Thomas Colligan.