I: February
in Kajwa-Dong
Up the mountainside's sloping path
are stunted pines;
the arms of others hold leaves,
curling brown, like squid curing on a line.
Smokestack smog streams in cold wind,
plumes like ink in water while music
from a harmonica
squeezes out above me as it slides over the ridge top,
played by an old man in a cap wearing knee-highs
and knickers. I hear the
voices of hikers from over
the summit, and their intonations become notes
in a scale:
the third is the mother's concern over
the fifth, which is
the wailing leg-scraped girl;
the seventh, her father's calming, carried
by the percussion of shoes on pebbles.
Inchon Bay down far below, past circuit
boards of high-rise
apartments, offices and factories, transistor black and
gray,
splashed with orange hot water tanks attached to roofs.
Freighters
and tankers slide out of port, as slow as the sun
leaving its zenith. Cries
from the nearby summits
echo through the gorge, swim along the ridges, untethered.
I feel that way, untied, staring at the seams
of Inchon streets tied tautly
to mountain sides,
anchored on the borders of mountain range and harbor,
the strands of streets flung off across the rice plains
like spider webbing,
whose silk becomes the glimmering
cars pulsing against roads and highways,
spreading like the branches of a tree in winter.
II: March Blues:
Losing Face
To them, emotion is weakness;
though distrust to me
is my defence,
a translucent disbelief that construes
my thoughts; but
to them, it reveals
too many inner workings: soft muscle,
not pistons,
not pulsating cylinders,
not circuit boards, but gesticulations,
aborted
motions, thoughts better thought of,
creating lines to cross or not to cross.
My days now have time for one meal only,
and I'm over-worked by what the contract
didn't state, tired of communicating,
because every time it requires translation,
usually done poorly. My evenings
unwind in scotch vapours and the smell of
smoke
through my clothes and walls. The ashtrays
are layered with water,
so as to be more easily cleaned.
I watch cheap cigarettes drown in them,
water sucked into the butt as ashes
are recollected. At work we float by
each other daily, but the line drawn in
water is meaningless, disconnected
from intention, and frustration is an exposed
tendon. I colour the see-through
emotions,
sketch something else, something less
organic, more machine-like.
That is all anyone really wants.
III: April with Kim Hyo-Sung
For
forty minutes each early morning we drive
through what seems like Dr Eckleberg's
wasteland,
to the generator repair plant where I teach
intermediate English
lessons to a class
half-filled with beginners. Our time is of silence
and empty stretches; the simpler questions are all
recycled, for our grasp
of each other's language
is too basic, and the day is far too early
to
talk about much else than music and food.
Each winter day we drive past empty
icy plains
that melt into fields filled with worker's backs bent
in the
sowing and then reaping of radishes.
The silence between us I grow to understand
as
less a want of common ground perhaps,
and more the lack of interest in small
talk.
But in the two season's worth of words we share,
I watch seedlings
grow, and value their beauty
in early drives through farmland in a country
where buildings are stacked-up sideways like cards in decks.
In Spring,
cabbages and radishes begin to grow
on the fertile ground of tilled and tended
landfill,
in topsoil as secretive as your thoughts can be,
hidden under
your placid face, and as we grow
to shift less in our seats, I realize that
those
earliest questions we've long since discarded
have become root beds
of calm and quiet friendship.