Water (I)

She woke in the water. Her body soaked and bloated beyond recognition. From her vantage she could see the gray, hazy sky. She knew she did not want to look down at her trembling reflection in the water, and so she lay like that, not watching the direction of the current, eyes fixed straight at the sky. What flowed through her brain was probably not water but sky. The sky stretched itself out with brute force, filling the entire world, blocking the far end from view. She wanted to see the flesh of the sky peeled away, spilling out dark water.

Camera

Don’t look at me.
I leaned in close, trying to pierce through its hostility, still as a mantel clock, with my nearsighted eyes.
Are you awake?
But I found that when it drew near, my eyes blurred, and its gaze slipped into the deep space of blindness.
If I could, I would like to pull my trigeminal nerve out from your luminous mouth.
I thrust my eyeballs toward the lens.

Water (II)

Iron melted into water running on the ground. Between me and the river there was a sudden drop. I stood on the grass watching the river before me. Wind at minus one degree rushed over, biting the warmth from my cheeks. I felt my hands gradually losing the strength to shiver. I shoved both hands deep into my pockets, faced the wind, and watched the water flow away. I thought of that high school evening in the plaza beneath the apartment complex in Shanghai, when I sat alone writing reviews of Rashōmon and Hell Screen. That night was purple. Back then I had only read Akutagawa Ryūnosuke and Kawabata Yasunari, and harbored a naive, aesthetic longing for Japan. I walked to the edge of the levee, descended the stairs. From here the water no longer flowed; it breathed quietly in and out. Cars on the opposite bank flowed in its place: red and yellow lights gliding along the horizon. After standing for about four minutes, the levee’s lights went out too, as though I had lost the right to be sad by the river again. I was an intruder here. I looked at the towering iron ladder and the fence beside it. It too had imprisoned itself, forbidding outsiders from climbing. I felt as though I were surrounded by people, yet I couldn’t see a single figure. Not until I ran down the grassy slope did the levee behind me light up again. I knew I was not running toward Tokyo or the millennial Ikebukuro West Gate Park. Before me was a small hut with a light above its door, so simple it looked like a child’s drawing. So I ran toward it, kicking away stones, stepping over stacked steel plates. Beneath that light, I saw the door was locked too. I had known this before I set out. It is now 6:42 PM Eastern Time in North America. I take a frozen meal out of the fridge.

Water (III)

My past, soaked
in a pool of brackish water.
You spear the white fish, peel off
the scales of the rising sun
from its body, scatter them in the waves.
I was staring anxiously at the surface then,
retouching the makeup on my reflection.

I walk into the seawater,
pushing aside grains of sand. You see me.
You say,
come in!
The surface struggles.
I jump into the sea.
My body,
scratched by the sharp
fingertips of the red ocean.
My makeup shatters in the glinting crests of the waves.

Then the sky begins to rain,
the rain turns out its guts
and binds
the sky that doesn’t belong to me
to me.
I am guilty.
Let this be my punishment.

The sea breeze sings softly.
The sea breeze seems to erase everything.

If no one had guided me,
I would have followed the signs
and stayed away from the shore.