I. The Discrete Fragments of Iris
For Sendai 1 [川内原子力発電所]
"Learn as if you’ll live forever; live as if you’ll die tomorrow."
-- Yuuki Yoshida, hibakusha
Fragment 1
Burn the skin off the trees,
Nip the buds
Stripped clean
燕子花
Kakitsubata
That crazy iris is blooming again,
Gone haywire
Up the trellis,
Under skies bleached
White,
Bone dry and stripped bare,
Clouds scraped from
The unbearable blue,
The sun
Burns holes in our hands,
Bores deeper into
The lattice of skin
There is a rhythm to this,
It seems to say,
In furls unfolding,
In violet flowers uncurling
In the ash thrown
Careless to the four winds,
And in the violence of expansion:
It doesn’t know
It shouldn’t exist.
Fragment 2
Maple leaves flare
Like red coals aglow
Demons of flame,
Spiraling on twisted
Fractal branches,
A spurt of lava
And you’ll dance
To a waking volcano.
Fragment 3
Island pines split by the wind
Dot the ocean, the spray
Hits my lips
The salt tastes like the sky,
Now oily, blurred and roiling
In the gray ash and
Turmoil of dreams
In the shaking of the waves
Come to drag us away
Lurk the rising tides of grief
The vanishing footprint
Unable to open on a vista,
The horror is in the void
We are cast in burnished glows,
Then you walk away
Shrouded in dusk.
Fragment 4
Edges of cloud,
Like the ends of the earth
At the continental shelf
Hover over me, fringes of
Purple-black
And orange glow
Explode with light
The sun’s last blast
At the day’s final end.
As we witness our own
Extinction
Will we revel in a new awareness?
Or is it just pain and
A snip of the thread?
糸
A quick fade
In a cresting wave
Fragment 5
The last time I saw you,
Dripping wet, clinging to life
In the surging of the tides
I said
There are suns yet to rise, Amida
Those tiny moths will rest again in symmetry
Along these broken stone walls
Brown flutterings in a brief ache of life
Then a pause
Like the stillness before a breeze,
Or in the moments you
Forget to breathe.
Fragment 6
Curved like the base of a well,
Or a collapsed bridge,
Boulders lay tumbled and cracked
Look up from its bottom
To see the perfect circle
Of night skies turn above you
Circles within circles
Form a rising stillness
Infinite change outside
The walls that hold us
The silent shadows
Open upon pure lands,
Quantum gateways,
Breached like curtains torn
Our infinite powers revealed
In those intimate, grey
Predations of twilight
Fragment 7
For amid awakening
There is delusion
Watch closely
How the thumbnail moon
Digs deep into the
Heart of the earth
Watch closely
How the fire-lotus floats
On the surface of the river
Two of us are heading
To the bottom
One of us is sinking
The other diving
Watch closely
How inside that flower of fire
The flame rises
Singular and eternal
Burning like my uranium heart
Do we dare touch the sun?
Watch closely
How the river god sighs,
Depleted and spent
Beneath the bridge of heaven
Spanning the milky skies
‘Horror vacui,’ it says, and
We are split in two
Time stops on these
Dried out river banks
Fragment 8
But amid delusion
There is also awakening
Watch closely
How Iruka
海豚
Swims on, caught in
The strangest currencies
Thinking merely
Of thought itself,
The endless nesting
{ }
She gives birth to the world
At the bottom of an
Ancient well
She sighs as the moon digs
Deeper into the heart
Of the earth
Ryu Ando lives and works in Los Angeles. His poems have appeared with various online speculative literature publishers, including Strange Horizons, Pidgeonholes, Liquid Imagination, a...p press, and more. He has been nominated for the Rhysling, Elgin, Pushcart and Best Small Fictions awards. His second volume of poetry, [零] A Phantom Zero, will be out in 2019 with The Operating System Press. Online at https://ryuando.wordpress.com/ and Twitter: @ryu_ando_98
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