A million stones, a million bones, a million holes within the chinking

[sovay]

I have not been sleeping well. I dreamed last night for the first time in weeks that I can remember. I had found used hardcovers of Gillian Bradshaw's The Dragon and the Thief and The Land of Gold, which in waking life I have never seen outside of a library; in a college town by the sea, I discovered a corpse in a bed of seaweed, slippery and unrotted, like a bog body. It was sewn within a second shroud of skin, pale and wet as sacking. A friend told me this was standard funerary practice in his denomination of Christianity, so I could stop carrying the head around in a fold of nori for the authorities to investigate. We reburied it in the black salt mud under the bridge where the tide had gone out. I guess my brain is basically all right.

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Urashima Taro sings

Knot me nori harai-kushi
bless me with lightning from the sea
pray me a seaweed prayer

Beneath the waves,
I slept with a young maid
Our limbs long and loose entangling
wrapping round and slipping free

Pulled from that soft embrace
I shriveled and stiffened
contorted like the konbu left to dry
Along the sand
So pray me a sea prayer
My own tears transformed
Into the salt of purification


More word play: the seaweed one finds in miso soup is wakame. The same word can also mean "young girl" or "maiden." So you can lie with the wakame and be with the seaweed.... or a young girl.

[sovay]

Urashima Taro sings

This is beautiful. Please send it somewhere. When I was in first or second grade, I saw Urashima Taro's story performed—it was one of the earliest Japanese folktales I remember learning.

So you can lie with the wakame and be with the seaweed.... or a young girl.

Nice . . .

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Thank you--I really... can never, ever tell with my poems.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

wakanomori tells me it should be

harai-gushi

So imagine the first line emended to reflect that!

[sovay]

So imagine the first line emended to reflect that!

Emended! Now get it in print!