Floating Worlds

Abstract

Floating Worlds Kathleen Hellen (bio) Leaving the Emperor’s Summer House In Hirohito’s house my father lives in the collapse of silk.The floating world of sake, scotch, and yellow fin.A strange cocoon of bars on back streets of the Ginza’s grid, Kabuki.The famous hot springs.He takes a bath. He speaks the language.He wears a moustache thin as Errol Flynn’s,bows to options from Nigeria.Oil from offshore rigs.Winter ’56:In a dolphin-gray kimono, my fatherwith my mother in a winter mink,her bangs cut straight, her belly big. In Hirohito’s house tea thins. My father trades for passport,trades the mink to pay his driver, pay the nursemaidthey call Monkey. In his duffle from the px stolen blankets.“We’ll always have …,” my mother says, her words a sigh, like Bergman’s playing Ilsa in Casablanca.The fall of Tokyo like Paris. In photographs they wear thedrab-green coats she sews from Army blankets.The stove’s a pit of ashes. [End Page 642] Sayonaras A son.He died bravely, they said,but details were unavailable. Only sand in the box sent back like an aerial view: 67 citieslike Hartford,the size of Hamamatsu. Yokohama/ Kawasaki /Nagoya. The waves of gale-force winds so hot. Self-sustaining, the cratered places where they had trainedin snow-white mufflers, all the same.“I saw him swimming in the flames,” a mother says.A daughter. [End Page 643] Kathleen Hellen Kathleen Hellen’s poetry has been published in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Witness, and other places. Her most recent collection is Umberto’s Night, winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize. Copyright © 2015 Kathleen Hellen