Stephen M. Dickey 

Translator

Blessed be the whiteness
of distant places,
a clean, ordinary T-shirt
with no one to kill!
At 05:00 A.M. in a hotel room
you rummage through your bag
looking for shaving foam
and thinking of the Antarctic.
Indeed, there would have been no
stopping you, had you
always been ready
for such an early start.

I dreamed that Kamtchatka
had broken off from the mainland
and was floating freely across the sea.

all the media covered the event.
(the Japanese were advised
to remain indoors.)

I ran through the city trying to find you
before the whole world fell apart,
but you were getting ready to go

to the movies with some women
I did not know. one of them stole my
coat. I was so desperate.

I screamed all night long,
but no one could hear me.
as if I'd been long dead.

I wonder whether I’ll ever have a cane
that blind men old men gentlemen use
a cane I can test the ice with like Yeats
or tap on the sidewalk, scare bugs
and pigeons when the disquieted times
come, those gaunt old downhill years
I’ll need that cane
something of a cane of rosewood or
some other wood, a cane of pastimes
and even an exclamation cane
which is indeed a clothespin of a cane
joining the earth to a hand,
their interlocking pair of pliers
where you loved me once.