Michael Leong
From “Disorientations”
[NOTE: “Disorientations” collages together—and so “disorients”—two postmodern Orientalist texts: Kent Johnson’s Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada, a yellowface simulation of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) literature, and Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs, a semiotic treatise based on an invented system Barthes calls “Japan.”]
Here, the glow of occurrence
pieces together
the illegible map
and the impossible rendezvous
with the simple knowledge
that one came at all.
This city
of forbidden domiciliation
can only be known
by activity of an ethnographic kind:
you must orient
yourself in it
not by delighting in the distances
of eyes
from identity
or lips to
address
but by the broken path
of becoming copious.
It is amazing to think
what the sutra suggests
but does not say:
orientation by printed culture
is sustained by a banal
and gestural practice,
all the more so
after our flesh,
managed by legal guide
and telephone book,
turns opaque
with the graphic ornament of
our skins.
Please take off your shoes
before walking into
the terribly intense heaviness
of pure contingency.
After caressing
the furniture
and feeling for a fragile order
in the flowers,
it is pleasant to study
the far-out and intelligent
dispatch of stars
and then to sleep
in an ancient jungle
or a wave-washed shell
where the smallest curve
of abstraction is stuck at home
but always singing.
According to certain urbanists,
the major landmarks of this sacred territory
are underground —
a geometric shoe stall,
an Edo circus,
a school built out of
blossoms and departure.
Beneath
veined cathedrals
of leaf,
a memory is being written
of prosaic substances
crossed by golden trajectories—
like an undated news flash
or the weeping tactility of snow
in April.
In the central station
dedicated to commerce and transition,
there is a picture
of pieces of a World II military train
washed up on the beach.
The empress says
we should insert
more functional worlds
beyond the mad insistances
of reality.
With long lacquer chopsticks,
she slowly moves
a fossil of a plastic dinosaur.
In its claws,
an American haiku.
In its teeth,
the empty condoms
of the mechanical
king.
Michael Leong is a poet, critic, scholar, and educator. His most recent books include Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018) and Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2020). He lives in Central Ohio.