SILENT WHISTLE-BLOWERS

GORO TAKANO

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York

SILENT WHISTLE-BLOWERS
by Goro Takano
Copyright 2015
Published by BlazeVOX [books]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without
the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
Interior design and typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza
Cover Art by Atsunobu Katagiri
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-218-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015939197
BlazeVOX [books]
131 Euclid Ave
Kenmore, NY 14217
Editor@blazevox.org

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Parents Open Day

After a train of hearses went by, I crossed the street
and reached the main gate of my two kids elementary school
at which an old woman was feeding a party of feral cats
They are the only kids I have, she said expressionlessly
What makes you think you were lucky to be born as Japanese?
passing before the question on a noticeboard, I first stopped by
my sons classroom where the teacher of English was asking
her students whether or not the sentence LETS JOIN US is
weird my son raised his hand and answered: Must be okay
Once the teachers careful explanation started, I went out
and, next, went to my daughters Japanese-language classroom
The male teacher was reading aloud the excerpt of a poem
in his textbook to his half-bored students
Strange Neighborhood by the Showa-era poet Murano Shiro
Every garbage bin in this neighborhood
Is riddled with death
Such as fishbones and the snipped bottoms of sausages
One day, a vagrant
Lifts the lid and discovers
The bin is, in fact, bottomless and so deep like a well
The hole goes all the way through
To the other side of the world
Must be somebodys secret passage, the bum thinks
He looks into it more carefully this time
And finds the inside of the Earth coreless and hollow
And the Underworld nonexistent
9

He clicks his tongue

And shuts the lid

I approached my daughters desk and peeped into her textbook

The words WHY? WHY? were carelessly penciled on the page
at the end of the poems final stanza
I left the school alone and, on my way home, I tried seeking
a garbage bin and a vagrant, but neither of them was around me
I saw the same old woman reprimanded by a young policeman
Your feeding will only increase the number of street cats
all of which will be euthanized after all, the officer yelled
The cats huddled around me like bums, and I suddenly thought
my sons answer may not be necessarily wrong one of the cats
tried to crawl upon the lid of a half-open garbage box set behind
the policeman and began to show her confusion as to whether
its lid should be completely opened or shut, when another train
of hearses approached me and the old woman and all the cats

[Note]
The original Murano Shiro poem I translated for this piece is titled, in Japanese,
(hen-na-kaiwai), which is included in The Poetry of Shiro Murano [Tokyo: Shicho-sha, 1987].
10

Quatrains (Part 1)
Looking for Saint Helena on a world map
after surviving another sleepless night
half believing Puff the magic dragon
still frolicks by the sea in the autumn mist

*
Staring at the trace of the stitches
on an old wound hes got in his mind
all day, a white-haired man in a wheelchair
misses masses of flowers ahead

*
Each nonsense can be a myth, as long as you never hesitate
to pay amply for the cremation of your beloved cat, whereas
you continue to refuse bluntly the birth of a new crematorium
in your cliffy backyard littered with tons of lemming furs

*
Littered with empty bottles of countless travelers,
the peak of a sacred mountain awaits another revolution
Harboring there alone is a legendary yeti
wondering if his own body is a mere superstition

*
My name was kidnapped and brutally raped today
Its lucrative business now, the kidnappers said
Later on, my country was kidnapped and forced
to make love to me before the eyes of the band

*
Never looking away from clean mortality tables
in her hand, an old life-insurance company woman sits
11

on a toilet bowl and, in the next stall, a young girl

folds a clean toilet paper to make origami hearts

*
Remember a comfortable beach exclusively for servicemen
at the edge of your cerebrum, where you eat the fancy liver
of an endangered snake sadly, and your fancy lover
whispers: What would you do if your mom was a comfort woman?

*
Through every stainless loudspeaker
a new solemn kumbaya anthem comes
along with an inaudible noise saying:
Kiddo, no easy way for social changes!

*
Like a doctor who aims to remove surgically
a cancer out of her own dying body
an old piano convulses her keyboard
in no spotlight on her melody

*
What is the biggest vice
on a composite photo of a poor nations
military base where a lethal nuke
is only a digitally-forged buzz?

12

A Dragonfly
Today on your inner stage
something surely dies
and from its very ashes
tomorrow and yesterday are born
Born quietly on a puddle this morning
was a transparent dragonfly dreaming,
in its larva days, about a silent old man buying
a glass of spirits one day and getting change
Now, in its transparent mind, the fragile insect
tries to revive the mans language in its dream
But the only dragonfly-language-like sound left
in its hearing is a clatter of ice cubes
Wasnt that a poet who sang this way?
A poem is born when the big top is pitched in me
where a trapeze creaks and a menagerie roars
and a clown taunts my guts with his ceaseless pratfalls
and my brain changes itself into a contortionist
Wasnt that the sick who prayed this way?
I want my double who is a thatcher on a roof
of a war-torn, two-storied pagoda in winter
Hope his slow job continues without a fall
and hope he has a mind of winter like ore

13

Wasnt that a woman who whispered to a mirror this way?

Just like me, you are a page
in an invisible dictionary
whose longevity depends
on our imagination, entirely

Wasnt that a sinner who cried this way?

Moss on my sleeping tongue

starts overflowing my yawning
mouth tonight again, and spreads
over the seeds of pangs in my lung

Wasnt that a painter who sought a landscape like this?

A fallen cherry-blossom petal

lands coquettishly in the rain
on a money order discarded
on the pavement of a redlight district

Wasnt that a priest who lamented this way?

Piled on a supermarket shelf are

letter pads exclusively for living wills
Sale! Use this, instead of
eco-unfriendly ones, a pitchman shouts

14

Wasnt that a playwright who sighed this way?

Full of meaning is a performerless stage

stared at intently by a crowd that loves
uniformly the word identity, each of whose fingers
seems too frozen to touch a neighbors hand

As the dragonfly begins to lose its transparency

it finally revives one human word: dragonfly
Then the foot of the silent old man who wrote
this stanza falls on its premature body

15

Quatrains (Part 2)
Only when sinners who need narratives
about who they are thrive on autopilot
and every selfless righteous mentor perishes,
can truly transcendent love be born, like a plot

*
A child who had lost his loved one
in my last nights dream was staring
at a lonely coconut washed upon
the uninhabited shore all day

*
Whenever my head is gently massaged
by the healing hands of Eros all night
the salivating Thanatos in my blood reminds me
caveat emptor is this therapys rule

*
A two-dimensional world abounds
in the fragrance of flowers whose spurt
wets my eyeballs and leaves them lulled
again in a four-dimensional world

*
Whereas a new wild-goose chase
works up the universe with no rest
I keep hoeing dawn to dusk, calling
weeds sweetie and the sterile soil comrade

*
How would I feel if I were reborn to be
a genius scribe who writes love letters to the Earth
16

in my few but fascinating words for all

humanity without exposing their disgrace?

*
Even when you watch a relief pitcher with zero ERA
slowly taking the mound on television at a barbershop
with every wisp of your cut hair falling like an elegy
another random killing is called a mercy somewhere

*
A son says: Dad, your words dont move me at all
His face looks sinful, almost like his fathers
When the father is about to slap his son hard
their invisible bond turns quatrain again

*
On a serene May Day, a throng of women gather in a park
and lie as one on the grass to mimic the dead, as their coach
cries: Having no experience is another worthy experience!
Learn to die for your country with joy is their slogan

*
My desire to yield what I am not goes out
on a limb like an old father who keeps talking
loudly with his deceased wife in a hospital
waiting room, forlorn of all his children

17

A Wake Song
Around the end of dawn
A woman tells everybody else to leave her alone
With the embalmed corpse and shuts the door, quietly
She slowly undresses the dead
And stares at its withering penis
Put near the husbands head in the wooden coffin
Is a washed-out photo of two gigantic rocks
Sticking out of Ha Long Bay, Vietnam, taken
During their honeymoon in the remote past
As if to reflect herself in a kaleidoscopic labyrinth
She starts to sing a nameless lullaby
Two rocks kissing

Smoke and ashes dont suit you

On the twilight bay

A bit too early to go earthbound

When your heart was like a dud

Or like incense smoke
Two rocks kissing

Rose of all roses, when will you

Break into flower one more time?
In your face I say our human language

Under blue moonlight

Is a result of sexual selection, almost like

When a war crawled out

This seductive dysfunction; now I nudge

And another crawled in

Two rocks kissing
Near a dragons tranquil sleep
When you wondered if
The peace youd chanted might be evil
18

A gyre widening from this rocking cradle

Evil as it looks, it is the calmest
Helpless as it is, it is fierce and sly
Honey of generation, how can I resist
Abiding by this last curfew?

Two rocks kissing

World is watching my aching heart

In the winter rain

Conceiving a changeless work of art

By a floating house
For the floating world

By calling to what I have handled least,

My own opposite, simply like this jest
When the woman cuts off the penis with a knife
The spreading waters turn rose-red in her sight
She will take to the grave this secret booty
And keep repeating her quiet honeymoon
Even after the cremation

(Note: Inspired by Kono Taeko and W. B. Yeats)

19

Quatrains (Part 3)
Behind the wall of anesthesia, my rotten molar,
tolerance personified, is now uprooted the faint pain
Im feeling on this dentist chair is its farewell warning
that every other part of my body will be soon like it

*
If you see me in a time-lapse sequence
youll notice me vaporizing nonstop
My vapor mixes with the whirling ones of others
and spins like a top on my sleeping forehead

*
You may be truly lucky whenever all the dead
youve long loved and missed but now forget
stand on a rainbow you cannot see over your head
and see you not yet sinful enough to be with them

*
After running throughout the night
away from a clich-drenched town
youre now trickling back into what?
Why the identical town in the mist?

*
A pointillistic watercolor of a skeleton
decomposes into numerous primary dots
They fly up in a night sky to become stars
wasnt that a lullaby my mom used to sing?

20

Like a medium who summons the dead

a larva of a cicada molts slowly
The cast-off skins of its peers invoke
war kids killed by their moms in a debacle

*
Until this moment you were in this world
From now on this whole world will be in you
will you be happy to face your own death
if this is the very last echo in your head?

*
Instead of a can of soda, this vending machine
served me a letter in an empty bottle saying
Leash / Beyond, and I saw my penis whining,
quickly carbonated, and sucked into the bottle

*
Every mirror I peek in to see myself
shows the word sic on my image, as if,
while the sun restlessly hesitates to sink,
the beauty of death soaks into us all

*
In this sheer darkness
where love and hate squirm
like a tangle, so quietly
a cactus flower blooms

21

A Moviegoers Confession
Located far down in a cherry-blossom valley like a fallout shelter, the only movie theater in
this town was already crowded and there was only one seat left, which I took in the dark
five minutes before the denouement of the late show.
The silent movies title was The Death of a Nation. Someone whispered, What a cheap title,
isnt that a third-rate Griffith joke? Appearing on the screen was a dying male botanist
sitting on a sofa alone.
[Intertitle] The botanist: Long time ago, two different poisonous plants were growing side
by side with each other in a sterile limestone cave, competing for the remaining
nourishment. And, night and day, they were respectively swarmed with a troop of blind
ants.
The botanist seemed like a guinea pig, whose mouth would never open. Someone
whispered again, Is that really his voice? Located behind the dying man was an obsolete
microwave oven.
[Intertitle] The botanist: One day, both plants bloomed poisonous flowers at the same
time, and the taller ones poison fell all over the shorter one, leaving half of its ants dead.
A close-up of the microwave, suddenly. The next intertitle said: This fable is a truthful recreation of what will happen again to this country while you all keep sitting there.
Someone murmured again in the dark, So the shorter flower lost this war, and now it is to
blame for the entire loss of its vassal insects. I sensed the entire limestone floor of the
theater swarming with ants.
[Intertitle] The botanist: The remaining ants didnt know of the deaths of their sworn
friends. They didnt hate the weakness of their half-dead flower. And they wouldnt need its
formal apology, because it wasnt a man of letters but just a flower they loved and
respected.
A close-up of the microwave, again. Why did it remind me of a crematorium?
[Intertitle] An invisible woman: Focusing only on the similarities between a drudge like
you and the endangered flowers you luckily collected makes you my butt.
The defeated-looking live ants appeared on the screen, one by one. They looked grateful for
the very poison, and my own definition of death quivered. This old man wont be saved,
someone breathed near me, and I feel deeply for him. Isnt this a happy ending?

22

The film ended with the dying man undead, but all the lights remained off. My
understanding of the whole story was still vague, while abrupt swearwords were heard in
the audiences. And I felt ants in great numbers creeping up my legs, chest, back, arms, and
face.
Spotlighted suddenly was an old man standing in the front row with a hammer in his hand,
who was, apparently, the director of the film and looked exactly like the botanist.
Welcome to the labyrinth of signs for pain and charity, my Poison People, he shouted.
I was surprised to hear him say that all the characters in the film were cracked clay, not
flesh and blood. Because so are you, he said, And isnt your half-life supported
completely by the sacrifices of others? Learn guilt! Why did I imagine myself stuck in a
microwave then?
To be honest, I came to this entertainment to join in the ad-hoc seclusion of my unseen
fellows, whose sacrifices had been believed to be the gravest in the history of this country.
The man with the hammer said, This film is my lan vital, my woman, but I would be
liberated without it.
The same film will restart soon and, ant-covered, Im wondering how many more times I
must watch it until I can go back home. This theater will remain packed forever, and now I
know the botanist used to be the Supreme Commander in the first part of this violent film.

23

Quatrains (Part 4)
From each crevice of a high stone wall
which stalls the drifting migration of those
who have narrowly escaped violence,
more and more verdant vines sprout

*
In a classroom there is nothing but the same chairs,
which say in chorus: Were the genuine humans!
Me fugue multiple, says the entire closed school,
the one you had graduated from before you were born

*
This old fountain where you will sip water from now
is cursed, and will make you eternally return here
ignoring this superstition, I gulp the water to sense
all the cleaners of this relic destined to die for me

*
A rage which can hardly calm down itself
against you and me decides not to complain
and becomes a springboard for an absurd poem,
wishing us godlessly spoiled by reading it

*
A mathematician who tackles the moral question
of whether a killer executed before TV cameras
can feel truly happy like Camuss Meursault
is a woman Im wishing to rape my egoism

*
Americans call it a blue story, Japanese a pink one

24

Chinese call it a yellow story, Spanish a green one

You and I are going to read this rainbow story
where all the rays in the cosmos have an orgy together

*
I wish I could visit a shrine whose priest is a robot
who gives me, if I cast coins into her offering box,
a series of hard problems to solve to keep me happy
and alive, a senile woman says to herself in a coma

*
After everything else perishes, only left in this
universe may be an army of translucent jellyfish
whose alpha male wins every sperm competition
and ends up transparent enough like death in life

*
Annihilation of the self, unification of a whole
boasting so, hydrangea shines at night, while
a firework, fading out in the sky, whispers:
If you cling to life, youll die all too soon

*
The first time I saw a real urine glass bottle
I imagined the hoary me peeing into it,
pretending to spread my seed to the unknown
does that mean misreading can be fertile?

25

Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation
A windpipe wonders what is choking it right now
Death has never been so near me, it thinks
Far above it, someone is demanding from somebody else urgently
Something like an acronym AED? OED? ABC? OMG? too distant to distinguish
A mighty right hand removes all the clothes
And puts itself on the lower part of the breastbone
A left hand joins it and says: Without us, this life is pathetically powerless
The two hands intertwine each other and start to press the chest
While its own breathing weakens rapidly
The windpipe feels something like a space junk flowing from the rest of the system
And whispering: No trust, no kibitzers your enemies are your truest supporters
The right hand infers that the sole culprit of the choke may be a grotesque bug
You may eat, the left hand says, some insects that have wings and walk on four feet
Leviticus? The right hand chuckles, while stepping up the tempo of its pressing
The windpipe feels something like a seismic wave addressing it:
Every victim can surpass her victimizer only if she survives
The windpipe thinks that the real culprit may be a clone made from its own cells
Or may have been washed up there, with foreign matter all over its surface
By something overwhelming like a tsunami, after its yearlong travel in the whole body
Without eating bugs, the right hand says, we humans cannot survive any longer
Lend me a help! Call an ambulance! Is anybody here? A mouth shouts and
Covers the other mouth with itself and blows odorous air into each vulgar alveolus
The left hand slightly lowers the forehead, and the right one slightly raises the chin
The windpipe senses something like a spaceship put finally into its destined orbit
A televisions voice announces nearby the oncoming disappearance of the whole Arctic
At last, one of the hands inserts its fingers into the gaping mouth
To take out a foreign object resisting every imaginable creature comfort
Something apocryphal and unrepentant may come out of me, the windpipe suspects
The right hand says: Caretakers like us need to help skillfully a patients storytelling
The left one says: The most powerful storyteller is always the most powerless
The right one says: The most powerless can represent the love of the public best
Wondering if its own power may be impure, the dying windpipe misses all humanity

26

Leaving something like frottage here and there on the windpipes wall
An amorphous poem drops out of the mouth and falls onto a puddle
Its first line is: Only when Im seen, I exist and spin my own shroud
But, before its second line shows, it disappears from the surface of the muddy water

27

Quatrains (Part 5)
Under a mug shot of an anti-government activist
who killed a few cops is a My cat is missing notice
No passers pay attention to any of them except
a Methuselah-like mendicant who doesnt seem wanted

*
Finally noticing that a genuine question is
the one without answers, an idiot returns
to his alma mater and, endlessly
kicks at its walls with tears in his eyes

*
Fatigued with keeping up
the pretense to have no enemies
a lonely boy peels
an orange as if to crush it

*
After I die here, which part of me
will you gnash first, ants? to this merry echo
no clear answer remains to be heard
around an old monument to A-bomb victims

*
From the back of a slight body
whose softness has been already
shaved off, a black markets heat
continues to slop around

28

A little girl blows soap bubbles in the hard rain

praying every one of them goes to the heaven
She wonders why they burst less than on a fine day
not knowing how many friends of hers are at-risk kids

*
A herd of the fanged drifting
on an animal trail is now
right on the sole threshold
in me, still indistinctly

*
Giving no assent to a voice
stressing the presence of truth
I trace a giant oval
across the void at night

*
A bouquet stands weakly
on a yet bloodstained
accident scene almost
like Miyazawa Kenji
(Note: Miyazawa Kenji is a Japanese poet and fairy-tale writer [1896-1933])

*
Artificiality of the concept of race
was run over again near my house
From a crevice of its pure-white belly
a parasite emerged but dried up shortly

29

Entomology
Under a premonition of a threatening sky
a deserted tomb of an unknown is staring
at every silently-walking man and woman
who may end up an unruly mob someday
Under the tombstone with no inscription on it
lies a small sarcophagus where nothing
is buried but a piece of paper cut into pieces
Who can restore perfectly the poem written on it
Trapped between a closed window and its screen
a brownish male praying mantis
leaves all his company behind in a garden bush
He plunged willfully into this narrow gap
Inexperienced in the texture of the screen he touches
for the first time, the mantis pauses
There is something dignified about his sinewy body
His dark brown eyes look simply challenging
and his thin legs seem unfathomably lonely
as if he has resigned himself
to the fate of an eternal prisoner
Thunderheads start to overshadow the western sky
and to bring a shower to this town
Months have passed silently since I volunteered to leave
my job to whittle myself into a better piece of work
No revelation, however, has visited me and
a voice lamenting my misjudgment still swirls
The mantis braves the elements
and throws his flat chest out high
with all his strength directing his ire to gusts
whenever the screen convulses
showing his wrath at the rains
whenever his view fogs
He begins to dance quietly, as if to squeeze
everything out of himself to prove his worth

30

Shutting myself into this small tatami-mattress room

What kind of dance have I been performing until now
I try to open the window to release him to the rainy garden
but the eyes of the mantis order me to close it again
and a voice echoes
My dancing days are not past yet let my solo go on
I nod to it and walk away from the closed pane
A young boy and his mother pause before the tomb
He asks her why it stands in the middle of Main Street
Displaying the death of someone we dont know like this
is nonsense she says and suspects that the water oozing
from this out-of-place tomb like a miracle is infected with
hazardous wastes illegally disposed everywhere
in this city
While walking away with his mother, the boy looks back again
to say the last prayer and discovers an empty insect cage left
on the very top of the tombstone and wonders why
on this rainy day

31