From the Terrace of the Hotel Fujiview
There are Americans here today.
Large of limb, broad of hip,
slow and lumbering,
they monopolize the air.
Two women, a man, a child,
the little boy is Asian,
not of them but theirs,
claimed, a history.
Another man, pot-bellied,
balding, his tennis clothes
an ill-judged vanity,
grasps the hand of a
Japanese girl. A hostess,
or so I think. These people
consume, swallow
the world like so much
ice cream.
And all this time
you sit drawing chairs,
occasionally adding
a figure in the background.
When I ask about your choice
Of subject, you say you have
faces enough already
in your sketchbooks.
You want, tell me, to
get the form of things.
The form but not
the voices. So I sit,
pretender to what might be
written, and your affection,
watching the broad-hatted
gardeners move about
the lawn. We too
devour. Above us all –
you, me, the voracious
Yanks, the snipping figures
by the bloomed azaleas –
mountains stand, green
and indifferent to all our
appetites.
It Rained Last Night
It rained last night.
I looked out from
my kitchen window
and the street below
was wet, and shining
in the light cast by
the street lamps.
A girl was walking
there. She had on a
yellow skirt and held
a pink umbrella up
against the rain. For
a moment she seemed
she could have been
a stem of blossom blown
along as she passed
the blue-roofed house
across from where I live.
This morning I woke early
and waited for you
to telephone. The rain
was gone, and with it
the shining street
and the girl in the
yellow skirt who held up
a pink umbrella.
Advanced Intermediates
With us it’s all past tenses now
We stammer in the present
and if the future’s voiced,
it has to be imperfect.
Interrogatives frame your history.
You answer yes and then
supply the details: the where,
the when, the how. We weep
and seek for different truths
with which to cover each deceit,
knowing that our grammar is
defective, vocabulary redundant,
accents out of tune.
Abracadabra
Seaside mountebanks bemuse.
Practiced hands and eyes
contrive to extricate your
trick of hearts with some
success. Later you regret
herself, cannot sleep for
troubling dreams, and, shivering
in the dawn hours, seek secret
comfort in my woken arms.
You speak of sorcerers,
and cards turned in antique rooms
where, spellbound, you spewed gold
onto the snowy rugs that carpeted
the floor.
No mean witch yourself,
meeting you from the boat
I found I had forgotten
the instantly remembered
peculiarity of your gait,
but not your brown skin’s
shining in the dying light,
the clarity of your pale grey
stare that somehow conjured
three days of unexpected
tropic heat in our cold
north island summer,
and summoned once again
from me affection illicit as
your own.
Young Woman Bathing
(For Pamela, Governor’s Beach 1978)
Your beauty shimmered
sunlight on salt water,
sunlight on the sea
by which you lay.
The oiled incandescence
of your skin; your turned
and sightless head,
you spine arched upwards
from the mat, your thrust hips,
the wanton disposition of your
arms, your legs. These things
confessed completely what
you were, but you lay all the while
in unawareness.
You stirred, stood up and moved
with iridescent flanks towards
the shimmering sea which
tantalized and then
consumed you. A lapse
of movement, a lull
of motion before you
broke the surface of
the waters, rising from
the foam, eyes shut still,
hair flattened to the skull,
shoulders streaming.
Phosphorescent in the sunlight,
you gasped the air,
angular feet poised perhaps
upon some hidden half-shell
of indifference.
Born in Leicester, England, but now long resident in Japan, Clive Collins is the author of two novels, The Foreign Husband (Marion Boyars) and Sachiko’s Wedding (Marion Boyars/Penguin Books). Misunderstandings, a collection of short stories, was joint-winner of the Macmillan Silver PEN Award in 1994.
He was a shortlisted finalist in the 2009 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. More recently his work has appeared online and in print in magazines such as Penny, Here Comes Everyone and terrain.org. Carried Away and Other Stories was published by Red Bird Chapbooks in 2018.
