Three Poems by Shuzo Takigucki

Nocturne

From a glass where swallows live
a prisoner removes her gloves
A moonlight bath gives her the equipoise of one in mourning
Night clearly illuminates everything inside night
A fountain kept sewing the wrinkles of the empty bed
She is as slender as a keyhole
Soon, she felt freedom in her pelvic ring

Between today and tomorrow a white handkerchief

An endless holiday of red lips
The sediment of the sun is at the bottom of the glass
together with the sleepless birds


Man Ray

A dissected moon
The white teeth of light
meet the light’s ribs

Shadow-lovers live inside the body
Listen to whispers
on an infinite staircase inside an enormous eye
Lovely words
transform into birds of light
inside gigantic crystal oculi
Panthers all out of lovely light are standing on their hands
All the stars reside inside garments

Light’s naked body
Warm blood could run
faintly through a statue


The Conception of Wind

The wind with a graceful lamp
reduces the leaves of trees to ashes
Your salad days are shaken up
by the mammoth hinge of night

On an alabaster night
everlasting youth
closes and opens like wings

A dream thundered in
and twigs lost the stability of stars


Translated from the Japanese by Mary Jo Bang and Yuki Tanaka



Reprinted from A Kiss for the Absolute: Selected Poems of Shuzo Takiguchi (Princeton Unversity Press, 2024) with the permission of the translators. All rights reserved.