my dumbfounded mother
make me realise
I’ve been tapping a bowl
with my chopsticks
Ishikawa Takuboku side-steps a couple of irrelevant details in his poem.
We aren’t told what he was daydreaming, or what his mum said. She’s possibly been muted along with the chopsticks, but manages to break through the mystical fog. It’s a fun flex for a poem to say that specific words and imagined thoughts aren’t important.
My Mum visited recently and I had the idea to take her to a ramen place and tap my bowl with chopsticks until she upturned the table. I was going to report back to you here, but it didn’t happen in the end. On the way to the ramen place someone got his dick out in the middle of the street and pissed directly in front of us. A gentleman of the old school. My plan shrivelled up to nothing, erased with his chopstick.
At the time, Mum was halfway through telling me something (“words”) as his sprinkler system was turned on and she just continued on with her story, unfazed. Lazer Catholic focus. I told her I was writing this today, about her masterfully ignoring the whole thing. She said:
“It was more than a pee, it was a waterfall.”
“It went over my head.”
Powerful stuff. My diverted plan makes me think of Blue Velvet, when Sandy honks the car horn four times as a warning for Jeffrey to get out of the apartment immediately. A seemingly watertight plan, but he doesn’t hear the honks because he’s simultaneously flushed the toilet. Yet another poorly timed piss.
The translator notes under the poem:
“Japanese parents used to tell their children, as a way of teaching them not to play during a meal, that the sound of tapping a rice bowl with chopsticks tempts hungry demons to come out of hell.”
From this we can all clearly see that Sandy’s four honks were essentially four taps of a chopstick. The diabolical Frank Booth is summoned from hell into Dorothy Vallance’s apartment. After our tap-less meal, Mum and I went to watch the perfect double bill film for Blue Velvet. Thanks to our
piss-pal, we summoned no demon. We just sat back and spent 2 hours and 4 minutes in cinematic heaven. Downton Abbey is the opposite of hell: it’s the palatial Edwardian home of the aristocratic and beautiful Crawley family. It would however, be remiss of me to mention that a great throbbing evil lurks under the Abbey. Tonight, when you explore its labyrinthine basement by candlelight, I pray that you take this locket, by way of spiritual protection. Its amber glow is in fact a crystallised urine sample from the future. May its light guide you when all hope and sanity seems lost.
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