On the Writing Box (Suzuribako) with Spitting Courtesan on the Lid from the Edo Period (III)

 

 

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.”