Runners In The Margins

RUNNERS IN THE MARGINS

Football long after Picasso. Just running isn’t
the right thing to do, but in our case, we are
mindlessly roaming the white field. That pole.
That bar. That line. Looking at them askance,
they’re more like a white dream. Not knowing
the location of our lust, that’s our defect we’d
hesitate to record in our personal notes. We,
the runners in the margins, won’t even be able to
laugh with a wife in a Baroque salon. But that the
haze-like light is “trembling,” it was confided to me.
Also that, if you roam, it’s “the immediate
experience of a hidden memory.” First quake. Then
the lust will automatically show its outlines. . . .

Football long after Picasso. That pole, that bar, that
line. My uncle who has the distant cheers seeped into
his alpaca coat is also walking across the salon, but
to us who see him off, eyes tending to be shyly lowered,
the act also is like a white dream.

Yes, we are runners in the margins.

“There is a historic body lifted above this
beautiful field.”

We are quaking runners in the margins.

“The honeybee’s wing-beat is the figure of
a flower’s lust.”


Akira Tatehata

Translation from Japanese by Hiroaki Sato

Posted over on Poems & Poetics