Red Dark Domain

Painting by Didgi Widgi


RED DARK DOMAIN

I knew your voice. The red dark domain under
the skin, where I was once derided and, even
worse, hated. I think your voice still remains
in the house people stopped visiting, though I
don’t know when, and, though I can’t really grasp
whether it is a photograph, a painting, porcelain,
a letter, the smell of rubber, a buried seal, the
pulsing darkness, or a cold request as a different
matter, but in any case it belongs to the red dark
domain between bones and skin.

It is a quaver and a squeak. Therefore it passes by.

I was told that the essence of being a monk is spasm;
therefore they too lose their color.

Now the only thing I can do is to place my
expectations in a large woman who has gotten away
from the lake water and has her elbow bent in a small
room. A different matter like that is cruel, too, but
landscape and architecture teach us that the borderline
between what’s visible and what is invisible is ambiguous.
Derided or hated, I withdraw into a castle of ludicrous
gestures like a quaking monk. And look for the voice that
is left. Under the skin, is the domain still red and dark?


Akira Tatehata

Translation from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato

Posted over on Poems & Poetics