no blossoms to scatter or bud,

spring breezes play

As a monument to my youth

I hang at my window

a plant called “bridal veil”

Morning Necktie

Set off to see for myself

my father’s name

carved in a Tohoku museum

Once the “world’s strongest,”

my father’s magnet

crouches on a shelf

Monday morning

the head of the Magnetic Research Institute

picks out his necktie

My father, perfectly at home

with rare earth elements,

loves Modigliani women

“Writing more love poems?”

half humorously

half anxiously

His present—

Sanuki noodles—

comes stuffed in a company envelope

Something warm in the way

he calls his wife “Mother”

without the least hesitation

He wipes his face with a hot towel

and sighs contentedly—

looking at him now I see an ordinary man

Moving away from the telephone

he sips his tea as if to say

“I’m not listening”

Forgiven

their inability to express tenderness—

men of my father’s generation

I Am the Wind

A letter overflowing with love

love that belongs

to the date on the postmark

I finish writing, put on the stamp,

and time begins to flow

toward the moment of your answer

Signaling the start of my vigil,

it stands sharply at attention—

corner mailbox

You have your Saturdays, I know—

mine are spent

pretending not to notice

Turn down my fourth invitation.

Sundays I do nothing—

this day belongs to me

Beneath your hard-bitten ways

I see a boy—

his skies are wide and blue

Floating together down the spring street—

this afternoon I want

to be seen by everyone

I don’t leap before I look—

look for what, anyway?

just slide along in life

Eyes shut, face buried in your beer mug,

you don’t even look at me—

what is it that you thirst for?

Two more hours

and I turn into Cinderella—

you go on about nuclear war

After this nuclear war you speak of,

turn with me, in the ruins,

into a flowing stream

“You have a bone to pick with me,

don’t you?”

arbitrarily you say—

maybe I do, at that

A break in the rainy season—

the ragman making his rounds.

Won’t you trade my memories for

a pack of pocket tissue?

Thursday afternoon

I twirl the dial,

just to make a noise in your room

“I’ll die at thirty,” you say,

and I in turn decide

not to die till then

Eighty kilometers an hour—

clinging to your back, I am the wind—

now there is only my arms around you

On her neckline the trace

of last year’s bathing suit,

she hears the ocean call

Told “I want you, Machi-chan”

my heart wants to follow him—

like children playing a game

Only eighty years to live—

yet the “whys” of twenty-one

resist everything

This 365-faced polyhedron, my self—

let it flee flow fly apart,

take off!

“When you get around to it.”

Knowing you will never call

I take revenge in a sugary voice

Rise, pale sun—

this autumn premonition

of losing you