Tanikawa Shuntaro / 谷川俊太郎 – Ⅱ
Pluto Barking at Poetry
The fax machine is hung over and is endlessly vomiting poetry.
Pluto barks at it, “Woof-Woof!”
Printed words, the man thinks, are sometimes noisier than voices.
Maybe because born out of the darkness of voices, those words crave for light.
At evening when a person with ordinary nerves might get a bit depressed
the man is shaped like half-melted Haägen-Dazs.
He has forgotten the beginning of the universe and the end of his life
both of which he had pushed into a corner of his brain,
while the days keep on oozing like a cow’s saliva.
Presently the words rise from the paper, blending into evening darkness,
and are sucked into Pluto’s mouth.
Longing for an isosceles triangle,
the man regresses into a coelenterate animal and lies down idly.
At that point a sleep-like awakening begins.
The man on the other side of the fax machine is of course the man himself.
The fax machine is hung over and is endlessly vomiting poetry.
Pluto barks at it, “Woof-Woof!”
Printed words, the man thinks, are sometimes noisier than voices.
Maybe because born out of the darkness of voices, those words crave for light.
At evening when a person with ordinary nerves might get a bit depressed
the man is shaped like half-melted Haägen-Dazs.
He has forgotten the beginning of the universe and the end of his life
both of which he had pushed into a corner of his brain,
while the days keep on oozing like a cow’s saliva.
Presently the words rise from the paper, blending into evening darkness,
and are sucked into Pluto’s mouth.
Longing for an isosceles triangle,
the man regresses into a coelenterate animal and lies down idly.
At that point a sleep-like awakening begins.
The man on the other side of the fax machine is of course the man himself.