Briars and Fragrances, and: Goat and Horns, and: A Leaf of a Girl, and: The Skill of Love, and: The Need for Empty Places

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Briars and Fragrances, and: Goat and Horns, and: A Leaf of a Girl, and: The Skill of Love, and: The Need for Empty Places Kyuwŏn O (bio) Translated by O’Rourke Kevin (bio) Briars and Fragrances Boy and girl face to face; they hunker and piss, so intent on the source of the other’s jet they are impervious to wetting their feet when they blink. Still the wind on its course puts the sound of the river between them. A sickle moon lies abandoned in a corner of the sky and the briars dig up the river bank— puppies digging the ground— where boy and girl play with a plastic earth-filled truck. [End Page 103] Goat and Horns Spring snow was falling. On the dead flower stalks spring snow was falling. On the black goat trampling the flower stalks without a second thought and on the tips of the horns that crowned the goat spring snow was whitely falling. [End Page 104] A Leaf of a Girl I loved a girl, a tiny girl, tiny as the leaf of an ash tree; I loved that tiny leaf. I loved its down, its radiance, its soul, its eyes. I loved its purity and its freedom—which you could almost see when the wind blew. I really loved a girl, a girl who was all girl, who had nothing that was not girl, a girl who would be nothing were she not a girl, a girl like a tear, a girl like sadness, a girl like a cripple, a girl like a book of poems, a girl no one can have forever—an unfortunate girl! Now she’s mine, mine alone, forever, a girl sad as the shadow of the ash tree. [End Page 105] The Skill of Love That I might love you I said “I love you” to the bus that runs to your door. That I might love you coyly I asked the art of love from the road the bus runs on, from the fishy smell inside the bus, from the immorality of the thief stealing from your waistband as the road curves right. That I might love you I drink rice wine today. I ask the rice wine about the art of getting drunk. It’s silly I know but the realization that I must be drunk to understand, that getting drunk is an art, and that art is a skill has me lying here drunk, I’m sorry to say, resting my head on the lap of a bar girl. I am awakened to the art of living and the art of loving by the tick-tack of chopsticks on a battered old wine table. [End Page 106] The Need for Empty Places Empty places need empty places for their empty places to go. Order and culture need empty places for the empty places of order and culture to go. Knowledge needs empty places For the empty places of knowledge to go; And I need empty places for my empty places to go. Friends, if there is no place for me to go, I need at least a corner of an empty place for my inanities to go. [End Page 107] Kyuwŏn O O Kyuwŏn (1941–2007) was born in Milyang in South Kyŏngsang Province. He breaks from the stranglehold of the conventional phrase, image, and attitude. His poems constantly point to the sterility of consumerism. O has received numerous prizes, including the Contemporary Literature Prize and the Yeonam Literature Prize, as well as the Korea culture and arts prize for literature and I-San Literary Award. O’Rourke Kevin Kevin O’Rourke, professor emeritus (Kyung Hee University), has published many translations of classical and contemporary Korean literature including Looking for the Cow (Dedalus, 1999), The Book of Korean Shijo (Harvard, 2002), The Book of Korean Poetry: Songs of Shilla and Koryo (Iowa University Press, 2006), The Book of Korean Poetry: Choson Dynasty (Stallion Press, 2014), and Selected Poems of Kim Sakkat (Koryo Press, 2014), as well as a personal memoir, My Korea: Forty Years without a...