TRAVEL POEM
Mizoguchi
This is a remarkable poem, set in Japan, culled from scenes from famed Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi’s movies.
So the poem is, according to Ricky, “all based in facts, however my addled mind interprets and remembers them. I sort of meditate on them and then see what comes.”
He got into seriously writing poems during the ‘quarantine’, as he refers to it.“I put music aside. I wanted to access another side of my brain. I started writing words incessantly, writing about everything I know and love. Since I was a little boy, I have been obsessed with foreign films. I believe it is because I worshiped my three older sisters, and they started bringing me to them when I was very little.
“Antonioni, Mizoguchi, and Bresson, [to be published next month] are the first poems in a series of meditations on my favorite directors, the visionaries who have shaped the inner eye of my aesthetic. I write music for the theater, but my goal is to create a theater of close-ups, like these heroes of modern cinema.”
Mizoguchi
Yesterday, a bird
Mid-flight, crashed into our door,
Falling to the wood.
*
It is hard to outrun
Hungry soldiers
In a kimono
With geta on your feet,
Especially with your boy
Clutching your back.
A knife’s plunge, though
Into your heart,
Can quiet the screams.
*
In Kyoto, a prostitute,
A yatona,
(They make house calls)
Stabbed Mizoguchi in the back;
Showing a friend
The scar, straight
Down his back,
He said…
“You can’t understand women
If you don’t have one of these”
*
His father had been
A high ranking Samurai,
Then a roofer,
Then a drunk-
Lazy and profligate.
His sister, a Geisha,
Looked after him,
So, he understood
Better than anyone,
The plight
Of a woman’s fall,
Her degradation.
*
In the low light
Of sunset,
Delicately gray,
They are drifting through the fog.
Occasional weeds peer up
From the water.
They are rowing towards death.
*
Greed impelled him
Then, a woman.
In a splendid palace,
Though she is a ghost,
And the palace,
A charred heap of ashes.
He doesn’t know
Of his wife’s murder,
Or what has become
Of his only son.
*
Oharu
After her lover
Of a lower class
Is executed,
And her family
Is banished,
Runs from her mother
Through the leaves
In frantic circles,
Until she collapses
Into a pile of shrieks
And pain.
*
Everything is seen
At a distance,
Or heard.
Like when Tamaki,
Now blind,
Calls out
To her two children,
Enslaved
And branded-
“Anjo. Zushio. Anjo. Zushio.”
Their names echo
Like the chimes of church bells
In Russia,
When the slaughter
Is nearby,
And the smoke is rising.
*
Smoke is rising
When he arrives home.
Luckily, his wife
Is right where he left her,
At the potters wheel.
But she is smiling,
And she is dead.
