SEX IN JAPAN
For Tony Frazer
Are you writing the same poem
or just getting older
forgetting the details?
Your first landing
was in a ryokan
in Nikko, by a lake
fucking your first wife
learning about deceptively hard
mats, love as ritual
your own paper-thin walls.
From Hiroshima Mon Amour
to In the Realm of the Senses.
After several wives
you just might know
the extent to which a man
can harm himself.
That was then. Now?
You’re back in Kyoto
and can’t help remembering that python
a middle-aged tart
looped about her belly and thighs
her smiling cavernous show
had a row of Japanese men
leaning forward in unison.
Now it’s all girls.
(As you were, then
not much more than a boy).
They fill the cartoon mags
like pastel-coloured sweets
a damp patch to each wrapping.
0 Kawabata, eat your heart out.
But I don’t understand.
It’s the elderly women
who are most beautiful.
And I can’t keep my eyes off
those lacquered reds married to black--
the bowls, the luscious almost nauseatingly
scarlet or vermilion serving trays
and that blood-red teapot
with its long thin almost
silly spout.
For Tony Frazer
Are you writing the same poem
or just getting older
forgetting the details?
Your first landing
was in a ryokan
in Nikko, by a lake
fucking your first wife
learning about deceptively hard
mats, love as ritual
your own paper-thin walls.
From Hiroshima Mon Amour
to In the Realm of the Senses.
After several wives
you just might know
the extent to which a man
can harm himself.
That was then. Now?
You’re back in Kyoto
and can’t help remembering that python
a middle-aged tart
looped about her belly and thighs
her smiling cavernous show
had a row of Japanese men
leaning forward in unison.
Now it’s all girls.
(As you were, then
not much more than a boy).
They fill the cartoon mags
like pastel-coloured sweets
a damp patch to each wrapping.
0 Kawabata, eat your heart out.
But I don’t understand.
It’s the elderly women
who are most beautiful.
And I can’t keep my eyes off
those lacquered reds married to black--
the bowls, the luscious almost nauseatingly
scarlet or vermilion serving trays
and that blood-red teapot
with its long thin almost
silly spout.