Once upon a time in Nagasaki Bay,
Dutch bumboats lorried crates of turnips in hock
for yams, mullet roe, and breamfish--once
a bodiless horse ran by this river in a red fog.
Now, from the lookout at Inasa, you can see
shadows of mustard sedge, etched into the smouldered stone
of a cathedral--fescue blooms by an overturned tramcar
in what once was a forest of foxes and badgers
and the laughing of a maidenhair tree.
Human armbones, femora, now terrace the orchards
where smell of suppurated skin and silence reigns.
In what was left of the penitentiary, 300 yards from
the center of the blast, physicians dabbed with tweezers,
cotton, and mercurochrome upon the floral patterns
on her upper back, now indelibly hers.
But she, older now, a Madam Butterfly to us,
marvels at shadows without bodies to cast them
as she recounts this past July's Bon Matsori
when tiny boats are filled with lanterns and sunume,
set free in the shoals for all the departed souls who linger
offshore at the place where the light first fell, refracted. can be heard.

[past] [home] [future]