The Delays of Travel

THE DELAYS OF TRAVEL

I have no memory of traveling alone. I
laughed at the endless hand-washing, its
fierceness, but that, too, was merely someone
else’s shame. Slow travel in which I pile up
false quotations. The slowness of prose.

Milk is white the way frosted glass is; a
transparent liquid turns white when innumerable
scars are made, I was told. Also, that individual
is another name for a group and that it is a
corrupt group, besides. (We were being laughed at.)
Individualist, what do you think of the delays of
travel? Are you ashamed of its “pretended
irrationality”? Or are you proud? (Laugh, if you
want to.) Even a man with a thin frame is, in bed,
a penile warrior. Repeatedly, time and again, he
stirs himself up like that. Pile up a liquid’s wounds,
prose on the desk, be late. Laugh at someone else’s
shame, a group with another name, be late. Toward
daybreak, the milk, too, is black. In your memory,
that dark point that touches the other. In the
darkness of the quotation, prose is left behind.


Akira Tatehata

Translation from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato

Posted over on Jerome Rothenberg's site Poems & Poetics