Ukiyo-E: Pictures of the Floating World - Poetry by Leslie Nutting (Xorys)

		               Moronobu
		    Woman Standing Beside a Cherry Tree
		 
		The woman is
		secondary to the tree.
		The existence
		is secondary to the line,
		the small marks on the paper
		that separate
		being from non-being.
		This is a
		 
		statement about grace,
		an abstraction
		of the season, which is
		formed out of the
		idea of small blossoms
		on the barely indicated
		twigs.  The pain of the flowers
		is not wanted by the ink, the
		honeyed exile of
		the pollinated nest.
		 
		The woman is bent
		and stays so
		as only a thought
		about an object can.
		Her back is broken.
		Everything is yellow.
		This is the coloured fingers'
		search for beauty
		in the darkness of the Spring.

		         Absences
		 
		You surround me with absence
		so that I dream of you
		and dream of a larger absence,
		a vast impresence
		that populates the singing air
		I drown in.
		 
		You have no wisdom any more,
		you have nothing to say.
		You have become a
		physical object of
		overwhelming size.
		The parts of your body
		possess me.
		 
		The night is your black hair
		that is untied
		and strangles me in its caresses
		like a fountain of seaweed.
		 
		The mountains are your knees
		that loom in the sky
		and close me in
		the vise of their cunning.
		 
		I climb you.
		 
		The fog is your
		perfume, that I
		cannot touch
		and fall in
		like an idiot.
		 
		I would enclose you in
		a bed, a box,
		a trivia of kisses
		 
		but you have grown too large,
		your bones
		litter the continent.
		And I grope for
		the inheritance of your belly
		in this theatre where
		the sun hangs
		on the lip of your navel.

		            Harunobo
		      The Oiran Hinatsuru
		 
		This is a picture of your death.
		In the picture you are not dead.
		You are standing in the snow.
		The two young girls who are with you
		have made an ice-sculpture
		of a dog, and one of them
		is painting its eye.
		You are standing on the right,
		beside my signature,
		in front of a clump of bushes.
		 
		It is very cold.
		There is no blood in the picture
		to disturbs its surfaces.
		 
		If the white line of your neck
		were broken by the blood
		it would be dark on the skin
		as the ink that makes these images,
		darker, vermilion-black.
		 
		And if I send for you now in my dreams,
		you are nothing but
		worms upon a skull.
		I have no illusions, see, about
		your honour,
		your departure.

		      Harunobo's Innovations
		 
		Technique.
		He was a master of technique.
		He invented new ways of lying,
		not content with the old.
		 
		He saw you could subtract an image
		down into its parts,
		stain each a different colour
		and weave them back in a brocade of ink
		into an illusion of completion.
		 
		But the key was subtraction,
		the workshop littered
		with the single tints
		abstracted out of things,
		pink birds,
		white faces.
		 
		He incorporated
		lines of poetry into his works,
		placing the figures
		to accommodate the written text.
		Language is most unreal,
		and he paints it black,
		curves it into the block.
		 
		Shaping his air with words
		that his throat never reaches,
		that his fingers cannot touch.

		        Koryusai
		     Dream Pictures
		 
		In the dream pictures
		the woman occupies
		the bottom of the frame,
		her dream is suspended
		above her.
		 
		For this reason
		her dream must be tangible.
		She cannot dream of love
		but of a lover,
		a willow tree, a
		bridge.
		 
		She cannot dream of freedom
		but of wealth,
		the rich dress
		of a princess, the
		wings of birds.
		 
		The edges of the dream
		are sharp as knives,
		where it hangs
		in its cloud.
		 
		The artist is even-handed,
		divided about
		that line's imagination,
		whether the woman
		creates or is created,
		 
		whether the colours in the window
		are the shadow that she throws
		or the death
		that she is drawn to.

		          Shunsho
		    The Actor Danjuro V
		 
		The actor at two removes:
		he is pictured in his role,
		and each, the
		picture and the role,
		is a frame that
		he is turned in, a
		joke he makes.
		 
		The picture is geometric,
		his gait interpreted
		as a sequence of squares.
		The anger he portrays
		is a structure of colours,
		an emblem.
		 
		In one gesture
		he dies on the page,
		leaving his face as signature,
		the twist of his jaw.
		He fades into
		an alternate reality,
		the things he caused,
		 
		all the small glances in the
		theatre of the war.

		        Shunga
		 
		The lovers balance
		on the bed, they
		fit together like
		pieces of a puzzle.
		This is the farce.
		The position changes
		but he is always
		inserted into her,
		 
		the urge stopped
		in the idea of penetration.
		This is not a metaphor,
		there are no seas here,
		no nets of fire,
		no swimming shoals of kisses.
		 
		This is a universe of things,
		where each hair
		stands on end.
		Lust is a concept
		that prowls in the
		furniture, each
		pulse a thrust, suspended
		from a mirror.
		 
		These actors do not dream.
		The line creates them,
		and in the line
		they roar.

		         Utamaro
		    Powdering the Neck
		 
		I sing of the
		snowy landscape of your neck
		(the nape of the neck
		is a turning point,
		it is a fulcrum
		and invisible
		to the possessor --
		hence is considered
		beautiful).
		 
		My words fall
		in a dark rain
		by your head, they
		scar the walls.
		I place a mirror
		in the portrait
		so as to show your face
		as well, but she
		becomes someone different,
		regarding you
		from her oval frame.
		 
		The picture is a triangle --
		your back, my words,
		the white face in reflection
		that stares up from its
		tilting pool of time.

		                Sharaku
		    Bando Mitsugoro II as Ishii Genzo
		 
		Though he is ugly
		the picture is still
		beautiful --
		this is the lie of art
		(or is it
		the truth of art,
		that the grotesque is
		transmuted by the brush, the
		mind that eats its
		strangeness?)
		 
		He draws the sword and
		grimaces, and the sword
		drips from his fingers
		like a beam of light,
		and his hair shines
		like a rainbow, like a
		pool of oil.
		Everything
		is more discreet than
		reality, articulate
		in its surfaces.
		 
		The welter of longing
		reduced to a pattern. --
		Is this what is left,
		or only a substitute,
		a prison of order
		 
		for the hunchback
		with the blade
		who comes for us
		grunting his
		own history?

		             Toyoharu
		    Uki-E (perspective prints)
		 
		This is a foreign way
		of seeing things.
		The symbols no longer exist
		in the plane of the picture
		but recede.  What
		is implied is that
		at the horizon
		everything vanishes.
		The image is no
		longer a statement
		but a space,
		into which
		the artist disappears.
		 
		Depicted are
		alien cities,
		invisible realities,
		to which the Dutch
		who broached the coast return.
		They sowed their geometry
		and crawl back to sea,
		shrinking down the bars of
		this irrefutable cone.

		          Toyohiro
		 
		His work is
		burdened with numbers:
		the four accomplishments,
		the four amusements, the
		three cities, the six great
		poets, the twelve hours --
		as though by cataloguing things
		he could defuse them,
		fix them to their
		relative desires.
		While he worked
		the government was panicking,
		sensing the shifting tides
		of lethal trade.  He
		placated it with images,
		quelled it with painted rooms.
		 
		His courtesans are
		delicate, ideal.
		Frozen in
		circles of learning,
		they contrive to please.  But
		time is not removed.
		His grace is
		twisted by knowledge
		 
		and all his surfaces incline
		to the null intruding sky.

		                 Hokusai
		    The Ono Waterfall on the Kiso Road
		 
		This is perhaps the
		highest point of art,
		this work of a
		70 year old apprentice
		in a dying monocracy.
		Nothing is real anymore.
		The figures have become
		subservient to the landscape,
		and the landscape itself
		is imaginary,
		 
		therefore there is neither
		death nor life, but both
		are possible,
		and would occur
		in a small corner of the frame.
		The travellers cross the bridge, and stop
		to admire the waterfall,
		and the bridge crosses
		from foreground to nowhere, an
		optical illusion.
		The whole world is impossible.
		 
		Nothing inhabits it
		but the eye, and the eye
		dwells on its splendour,
		learning to
		live with lies.

		       Hiroshige
		       Wild Duck
		 
		Things change.
		Illusion replaces
		illusion.
		This is the floating world.
		Photography is imported
		to record
		the mistakes of nature,
		forcing the eye
		to new confessions.
		The Shogunate falls.
		The River Inspector
		dies of cholera.
		Accident, in history,
		is supreme.
		 
		In his work
		colour replaces line
		as the primary element.
		He seeks for some
		truth in tone, that
		narrative has foundered on,
		 
		and in his words on the water
		for the drift of the current
		not its dream:
		 
		'The wind blows on the lake
		And cold grips us and perfection
		When the last bird speaks.'