77: Gaijin

“Entombed in the intent of another man’s ride In vessel’s vapour-weight hanging In the seismic bubbles of the flautist’s call That’s where you’ll hear my banging” ———————————————————— My name is Serenity Mawk, former director of the Royal Academy of Engravers, Britain and presently head of the Imperial Bureau of Poetry in Kyoto. It’s an exciting and vibrant time for poetry in our great nation. Matsuo Basho, Nozawa Boncho, Mukai Kyorai and Karai Senryu, among others, are really expanding the form; pushing the boundaries. (Even if, at night or during blackout, they may be imperially obligated to pull those boundaries back into their original locations). You may be wondering how I became the custodian and progenitor of a new wave of poetic form in Edo-period Japan. Well, I’ll tell you… Shortly after being stripped of my tenure of the crown’s collection of engraved dignitaries at the RAEB, I’d had myself packed into a return consignment of loaned woodcut proofs, by the celebrated printmaker Umami Bonbon. By suppertime, I’d been loaded onto the Intercity 247 to Portsmouth, and by breakfast I was on the steamer to Kobe, tearing ribbons from the woodcut proofs with my teeth and washing them down with chunks gorged from the master woodblocks themselves. By the time they popped my crate in Kobe some 14 weeks later, I’d lost 3 stone, 9 teeth, and had eviscerated a body of work comprising some 23 woodblocks and 164 prints (although I left the frames, I never eat the frames — all that varnish and gold leaf plays havoc with my gut). When the customs officers lifted me out of the packing foam, with my limbs splayed out and pressing against the frame of BonBon’s much vaunted “Ga” [like the spokes of a swastika], as the first opened his mouth, as if to say “え？ 箱の中に外人がいます!” [E? Hako-no naka-ni gaijin ga imasu!], I turned my head, looked him right in the eyes: “Taste the Serenity” — I kicked my nice sharp shoe right in his mouth, and using the incredible strength in my ankles I’d developed foot-knitting container jerkins for myself from the undigested artworks, I pivoted myself out of the crate and, rising from the jaws of the customs agent, like Christ the Redeemer rising from the peak of the Corcovado mountain, I kicked the other agent hard in the front of his nose, his eyes flying out their sockets; brains squirting out his ears, and with a triumphant screech, I hopscotched over the heads of every attendant officer of the port and fled, cackling into the thickets of the mountain woodlands. 19 months later, having hitherto subsisted on a diet of berries, bracken and abandoned grandparent bones||parts, I realised there was a cultivable spattering of wild wheat, numerous unfertilised and discarded goose eggs, and a local family of domestic goats, whose lack of trepidation was matched only by the copiousness of their lactation. Fast forward 7 years… It’s about a fortnight before harvest time, and I’m finally forced into a corner; left with little resort but to install rubber bear traps on the perimeter of the Mawkmoor wheatfields. For the previous 7 years, the bears have been increasing their operations under the light of the harvest moon: decimating the wheat-crop, ravaging the blueberry bushes, eliminating the lemon groves, expunging all the goose eggs, and, even, somehow, draining our goats of their goats’ milk. I would go down to the pens in the morning with my tin pail, and my feather-touch neoprene milking gloves (both uncovered by chance when I was digging (in futility) for truffles around the roots of a giant Coral Bark Maple), only to find their poor, twitching goat bodies slumped on their scanty beds of straw, their eyes a desperately quivering void, staring deeply and and questioningly into your very soul, everywhere and nowhere at once, intensely honing in on and privately ingesting your most obfuscated and sublimated traumas, all the while fixing you with their gaze with an expressionlessness accompanied only only by the kind of rhythmic but disengaged mastication you might see in the jaw motions of a gum-chewing Nashville waiter-boy, their teats raw, wrinkled and spent, like the stick-ends of a Peperami, bitten off by your OCD cousin and unceremoniously expectorated under your single, mesh-sprung mattress, discovered by Griselda and placed discretely on your bedside table the following morning while you were at hockey practice… Those goat teats, that before the arrival of the bears would resemble lazy, ruddy plump slugs, now jutted rudely from their downy chests like an array of sun-scorched rabbit-droppings. And this year it was worse than ever: there wasn’t a single nanny that wouldn’t wince, rasp or bray like the slipping fan-belt of an air-cooled RV if would so much as graze her undercarriage with my neoprene. As I surveyed the knackered herd, broken and wheezing in the enclosure, I thought to myself, ‘This is the last straw. I’m getting out the bear traps. And ordering some more straw.’ While following the classic trigger-snap dual-jawed design of the traditional bear-trap, the purpose of the rubber trap’s teeth — being made from plant-based, natural rubber, rather than the lacerating mined-mineral, processed metals of the more punitive denticles — is not to maim, but to impede: To hold the target fast, until such time as the appropriate measure may be taken. The measure planned out in this case was to be a firm but well-mannered clarification of our respective boundaries. I’d steer clear of the treetops, if you, bears, would please have the grace to respect my sovereignty over these crops, these geese and these goats. And the wheat-flour, eggs and milk that they provide. Now, I’ve hitherto never seen one of these bears in the flesh - not at close range anyway And, granted, I probably spent too long this morning scratching around that old Acer for truffles (I’m sure I read somewhere there were truffles in the Hyogo forests)… Anyway, by the time I discover the bear, he’s clearly been there some time - he seems totally dehydrated, paws flaking, eyes sagging out their sockets, tongue lolling out the corner of his mouth like a shrivelled goji berry. I’m gripped by a sudden and all-embracing compassion. “Are you… okay?”, I ask. “Is it pancake day?”, says the bear. “Sure”, I say. “Everyday is pancake day now”, “oh… good”, quivers the bear, gasping his last, “you passed the test”. And with that, the bear’s eyes roll back in his head, his shrivelled tongue flickers in final wheeze, “ありがと”, and as one of his paws unclenches, a tightly rolled pancake falls onto the ground. I pick it up. It’s not pancake, it’s parchment. A scroll! I [break the seal and] unroll it. It’s a royal decree from Emperor Nagahito. It simply reads: From seismic bubbles The vassal’s vapour-weight hangs Entombed in his hide Then, in parentheses: You got the job.