Lacquer
on wood with sprinkled gold (maki-e).
Spit is
a form and a part of hiss.
Or could
it be a golden dusting?
Here
though—a courtesan
spitting
on love’s perseverance.
Spoiling
trade and trade-in—
scoring
grooves and graves,
ruts
and furrows in the soul!
True art
practices love’s perseverance.
And it
is this art that is putting us to test,
not the
other way round.
On that writing box the geishas’ bodies are in gold,
so are their clothes undulating around their arms.
Oh, yes, so much wealth they gathered and brought in.
And those bodies and robes shimmer with the sunny shine,
like the tea top in the corner on the bench too all but set
to disappear and become one with the air taken in
by someone’s later indifferent, involuntary breath
just as one, in the same reflexive, impetuous vein
spits on the wall with a slurring, corrupt black tooth stain:
“Perseverance in love”—how could such a beauty,
so well broken, so well trained, pervert with such disdain
such a simple verse of good old-fashioned reverence
and hope—both love and its exemplary serving trait,
its key tincture, its quintessence, and the keynote
of love’s ever that severs one from the vulgar and
profane,
trading love that turns the soul to bloom and into art
for being soulless possessions of the soulless men,
for soulless cages’ bars and blocks and bricks and plates,
for this vengeance payment in which such a venal trade
likes to frame the spoiling hunger of its defiling act?
How much paint did the woman buy to carry in her cup
to adorn her outside to become more adored and better priced?
Or had stain been there first before it became the blackest ink
that takes all light in order to make and be a calligraphic art
and change a foul and uncouth mouth for a graceful hand?
Or was paint for writing first only to sink and erode into
stain?
All depends on how knowingly and deeply one dips to the heart
and soul—just as this very old Japanese box when it tilts does
let
the spit, the courtesans, and even the whole scene disappear,
disperse as a mirage in the glimmer of delicate gold surface dust—
as if saying that all surface is mirage—just an angling, ogling
line
that makes all the art and soul beneath evaporate and be unseen
like Tantalus’ liberation stream and denied hope of deliverance.
Or is it that the soul herself is such dispersed, blown-out dust
of blackened gold, always waiting, calling for a rebirth of her
art?
For her one true calligrapher? With an eye that wouldn’t miss?
Where and how do the soul and love attain all that blotting taint—
ulcerated disarticulation, disfigurement, ruin, alteration?
What alchemy, what spell, or rather what discipline turns
the blackness of the light into its gold that inheres down deep?
Do the blackness of the light that either writes or spoils
beauty’s empyreal shine like the gold of trading harm
and blot and blind the character and its divine sound?
And aren’t both love and soul like that inkstone that is
ground that lets what we’ve got and bear along inside
be delivered and appear outside on paper or put-on silk
through the markings of its discharged dust and soot?
Does one turn into the other through the gold and blackness
of such spells or is it rather the sight, the soul itself
that is tilled and tilted, but which must endure
unless she becomes its own remote shade, a light
hollowed, carved-out, crafted- and carted-away
from within—past remembrance and recalling?
On this box, on its lacquered face, it does so seem
that black is such a spell and so is its opulent gold—
one into another lit or darkened, inverted, overturned,
and yet each of them with an act and feat of marvel—
its own masterly calligraphy—in the women’s hairdo
or in the golden needlepoint with a tender tinge of rose
by which the raiment tries to match the naked skin,
and both outdoing the dream in writing on the wall
that might have been a verse, a haiku, or a lyric poem,
love’s own calligraphy by which the soul’s collected
like honey out of season’s blossoms, blooms, and bosoms
past spoilage, decomposing rot—death in dying and decay.
And thus perhaps the key and the point isn’t in the color,
but in the very calligraphy which is either reached and known
or not—being dissolved for the eyes which line up flattened
with the surface and its message lost in the spray of golden
dust
that melds with amaurosis, one’s own light-devouring blackness.
As on the cover with the Edo women who trade in art and culture,
in pleasure and love and in loneliness and bonding, the black may
also mark the hardness of the geta, geishas’ indentured
shoes—
while the gold—the medium and fluid of their coiling spells
is serving as the foil. “Until you tried geta, you may
not know,”
in Japan people say—“Till the match is over, you won’t get the score.”
