THE BOAT ON THE MOUNTAIN
A wooden boat on the mountain, wound up by vines. The bow of the boat was lifted up into the void. The town and city of memory that can be seen from there. A prison of bones that breaks the skull. A stake driven into the eye. The darkness of the hand that has been taught to select the seed by the hand that has been selected. Unable to live, unable to die, the wet paper of the cinders scraps underfoot. A stone picked up by a fallen hand. The many-footed words that crawled on the back of the stone run away in my heart.
While deceiving the difficulty of life, the forgotten passage of death collapses from under our feet. Hard eyes open to rotting fruit. A swollen bump or mushroom in a merry whistle. A glistening, scaly thing here and there on the street. The voices that cower, saying, I can’t go back, I can’t go back. Make those voices into a sea. From the lowly streets of the world, I will raise a swirling tide.
When the hands of the earthly resolve invite the hands to untangle the tendrils, sadness drifts like waterweeds on the mist-shrouded mountain tops. Drowning in the depths, I grasped a bundle of fire. A boat begins to launch from the light that is released from the hollow of my palm.
A waterway without a waterway. The place where the boat is about to go. Darkness descends and burns up from the surface of the water. The sound of fire burning the cinders danced in the air. The sound of the fire that consumes the cinders dances up and down, illuminating and guiding the boat.
VOICE
The sound of a coupling train. The sound of couplers engaging. Even in our smallest conversations, we are captivated by the auditory hallucination of this sound. The handshake of a carefree hand. A tunnel that has been cut corners. The subsequent cave-in. We have become accustomed to these hopeless verbal landscapes. But there is an echo in the organ of the soul. An echo of prayer that has lost its purpose and object. The wind’s joints rumbling, the pores of the trees and plants opening up all at once.
The smell of sand. The smell of burnt stone. The smell of straw. The smell of rice. The smell of sickness. The smell of rain. A hundred phantom pillars standing on the surface of the river. A hundred dead people leaning against them. The voices of the dead. It is not my memory. The scar of a bonfire between memories. Bells buried in the earth. A rotting arrow. The soles of my feet stepping through the seasons, brushing away pebbles. Pebbles that have been swept away.
The flow of people. An echo swaying among people. An echo swaying on a damp paper. When the scraps of discarded words rise up on the streets at night, the margins of people are scribbled in black and a river flows through the torn margins. Smoke rises from extinguished bonfires, subterranean bells ring, and rotting arrows are wounded. The sole of the sole sealed in my many layers of strata. The throats of my birds strangled to silently record it.
