"Encyclopedia of Food Riots"

static in my head
is money in my pocket
smoothe the love-rank bed
with only ghosts to rock it
gray horizons speak
movie of the week
gerdanlouk is sped
limn the empty socket

cities of the dead
wheel a forsaken sprocket
bradykinin bred
and poison in the locket
now the poet rises
with plate-sized irises
ready to have said
his say at the quisling docket

where we are is clear
our fates, our loves stand naked
only the atmosphere
veils with fulsome orchid
shrouds in doublespeak
movie of the week
chronicles of fear
and a ferret in my pocket



"How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror."


(Years ago i posted this in the Tanka yahoogroup; i am reposting it here so as to have it all in one convenient place:)

a year or so ago i undertook to translate some of my favorite tanka into the artificial language Lojban. at the time i did this i noticed that the old Rexroth translations i used were not only not in form, but often not even five-lined; & so i thought when i posted them to the Lojban list, i would modify them into the same strictness as my translations. here is the result of that exercise, along with a few i added just the other day. i know on one level this sort of thing is as barbaric as when Dryden turned "Paradise Lost" into rhyming couplets. but, i'm not claiming it's an improvement. anyway...

1.

'As I watch the moon
shining on pain's myriad paths,
I know I am not
alone involved in Autumn.'

--Oe no Chisato (Rexroth)

As I see the moon
tracing all the manifold
highways & footpaths
of pain, i know i am not
alone involved in Autumn.

(the literal Lojban runs: I observe the lunar illuminer of many harming roads, & intuit an autumn pattern of me & not-me.)

2.

'I go out of the darkness
onto a road of darkness
lit only by the far off
moon on the edge of the mountains.'

--Lady Izumi Shikibu (Rexroth)

[this is my all-time favorite tanka.]

Out of the darkness
onto a road of darkness
i go, illumined
only by the far-off moon
on the edge of the mountains.

(My going from the dark via dark ways, is illumined only by a small moon on the mountain slope.)

3.

'In the Autumn mountains
the colored leaves are falling.
If I could hold them back
I could still see her.'

--Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (Rexroth)

Here in the mountains
of Autumn the rufous leaves
have started to fall.
If i could only hold them
back--i could see her again.

(Autumn mountains. Falling are the leaves that have color. If i prevent it, i now see her.)

4.

'This is not the moon,
nor is this the spring,
of other springs,
and I alone
am still the same.'

--Ariwara no Narihira (Rexroth)

[this tanka has haunted me for twenty years, & i made many versions. after a while, the "moon" became a "song"; & my latest version owes as much to Earl Miner as to Rexroth:

'This is not that moon
And it cannot be this is the spring
Such as the spring I knew;
I am myself the single thing
Remaining as it ever was.' ]

This is not that spring,
nor even the selfsame song
so broken-hearted.
I myself am the one thing
staying as it ever was.

(It is not so, that here is the spring or the moon of me. Nevertheless, in it i myself am constant in pastness.)

5.

'The white chrysanthemum
is disguised by the first frost.
If I wanted to pick one
I could find it only by chance.'

--Oshikochi no Mitsune

White chrysanthemums,
lost amidst the handiwork
of this first snowfall:
if i tried to pick one i
could find it only by chance.

(The new-ice-weather hides the white ones from me. If i wanted to take, i only by luck could find one of the flowers.)

[unfortunately, Lojban lacks a precise word for "chrysanthemum"...]


"Right now, we're just about where we were back in 1932 when FDR set up the WPA and set off thirty years of government planning and investment."