Japan

Sitting in an office, staring through the long windows
Of the next building’s offices, I see cold sky,
I see black mountains flat on it like stencils.

Through lower windows in that same slab
I see a line of office window river panels,
The river brownish blue, and surpassingly calm,

Intricately-placidly rippled by, one guesses,
A subtle wind, a dull iridescence, a factoid.
I see a few red-tiled roofs below the river, too.

Then I’m standing still in my grey business suit,
In a garden, before a stone shrine, as a bullet
Train passes on an elevated track behind me.

Somewhere, a factory echoes with company pride;
I go to a convenience store. The bright J-pop
Field, on gecko-steps: on round pink toes.


The Eye Itself

The forces of plenty
Had unleashed flowers and weeds and a coat of moss
Across the stepping stones, where minute snails
And lip-fat earthworms red as hog’s blood
Made their voluptuous-lugubrious way. Nearby
Stood a cigarette machine, being serviced
By a gaunt brown ramrod of a man,
Who seemed ever-so remote,
Like the essence of all humanity, man-mode, old school.

I watched him in respectful silence, as he loaded
The cellophaned boxes. I waited to see
If he would stop, after, and have a smoke.

But he kept going, his udder of change
Clanking loosely at his belt of tools.

Soon he was gone, and only the garden was there.


But Anyway

The old sailor, with
The nasal twang
Of a ten-year-old, sleeps
Swaddled by a map blanket
His mother gave him
Before his voyage out some
Thirty years back. He’s in love
With a Russian hostess
And spends all his jar money
On buying overpriced drinks
At her club, called Striped House
Because painted like a candy cane.
The moral of this story is, but anyway
All this happened in Tokyo,
1966.

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Andrew has self-published two previous collections–The Ages, which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and Of the Scaffold. He writes, ‘The new book is meant to complete a trilogy investigating various obsessions, including political and religious violence; the three poems offered here are from what I guess could be called my “Japan obsession” ‘.