from August 2009

A photograph. A self portrait taken beneath a tree in the park near Tokyo station, near the imperial palace. Red rings under the eyes. He is hungry. He thinks of her in passing, that she would have loved this spot, that they might have named it in the manner of pony-shit park in Angers. This is the glassy look you see in his right eye. He wears a black shirt to soak up the light that surrounds him, so that the absence of him is what you will see, though all else is green and vibrant, reminding us that it is summertime. Among those things we cannot see is a couple, lying in the grass, wrapped up in each other, lazy, he is reminded of a pair of dogs who used come around in July and August, while he had been digging a ditch around the front of his father's house to capture the ground-water before it might enter the basement. A small mut and a large retriever. They had been a lazy pair, under a tree in the adjacent yard, the little one occasionally turning its head to the neck of the larger and biting playfully. The other yawning. The young couple is passed occasionally by those strolling through the grass, who give them disapproving looks. What's wrong with this? Thinks the man in the photograph, Is it a jealousy, do you imagine it is a sexual embrace. Certainly they are lovers, but I can't imagine a more innocent display of intimacy. When I lay with my lover in the grass in Pennsylvania springs, it had been the same. And perhaps we received such disapprovals, but, like these two, we could not care. There was not a thing in this world but my lover's eyes, her breath, the warmth of the sun radiating in the moist ground. A world that cannot exist for long, yet which is an eternity when we are within it. The man in the photograph is looking up toward the branches. Because we cannot see them, we imagine it is hope he has caught in his gaze. It is, in fact, a bundle of green needles, and a line of unidentified insects, having located something of interest on the tree.