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Azalea: Journal of Korean Literature & Culture, Volume 3, 2010, pp.

241-249 (Article)

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aza/summary/v003/3.kim.html

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 Five Po e ms an d an E ss ay b y Ki m Hy e s o o n

Translated by Chae-Pyong Song and Don Mee Choi

The Hori z on

Who broke it?

The horizon beyond,
the fissure between heaven and earth,
an evening where crimson water spreads out from the gap.

Who broke it?

The slit between upper and lower eyelids,
The scars of my body broken because of emptiness within and
without,
an evening where tears erupt from the gap.

Can only a wound flow into a wound?

The glow of sunset rushes toward me as I open my eyes.
When a wound touches a wound,
red water flows without end.
Even the exit, disguised as you, shuts in darkness.

Who broke it?

The white day from the dark night.

241
During the day she becomes a hawk,
at night he becomes a wolf.
Through the gap, the evening of our encounter
brushes by like a knife blade.

—Translated by Chae-Pyong Song

242
 Flu

We looked at each other in the other world

as if I existed inside the black-and-white picture he was looking
down from.

Inside his picture I always felt cold.

Coughing trees were standing along the river, hacking away.

Whenever I awoke, I was always climbing a snowy mountain.

After narrowly making it around a corner, there were still vast white
snowfields
and endless cliffs that dropped sharply from the edge.

That evening I looked out at his eyes, wide open like a frozen sky.

A rumor spread that a ghost with the flu was coming to the village.
At every chimney, clouds shook their bodies.

He is not in my body, because I drove him out.

With an avalanche in my heart I shivered for more than an hour.

As coughing trees shook down snowballs,

jagged ice shot out from the open valley.

Barefaced, I was sitting on a frozen bench,

withstanding the wind, with quivering lips.

I wanted to escape from this frame he was looking down from.

—Translated by Chae-Pyong Song

243
 Starf ish *

I leave my starfish in the Pacific Ocean

my cuckoo in Tibet
my sloth in the forest of the Amazon
and I cook and lecture and age like this

I tie my fingers to a pine tree in the tundra

and bury my eyes beneath the vast snow of the North Pole
and leave my heart to melt in the abyss of the Pacific Ocean
and I cook, eat, sleep, drink, and even laugh like this

Therefore sadness blows in from Sumeru

Cold tears arrive from the bottom of an ice sheet that never melts
all year long
Therefore fever arrives from the Sahara
from a faraway place overgrown with cacti that can’t close
their mouths, for needles stick out from their tongues
the inside of my open mouth is hot as lava

So don’t keep coming to me, my starfish, crazy starfish

It is said that you were made from a fleck of rice
and can become as big as a house, a mountaintop
Don’t return here even if a ditch forms from the tears
that I shed every night from missing you
the ditch is not a place for you to live
If you keep coming back I’ll pin a star to my hair
and all the night of the world will explode inside me

A fine new day arrives like a clear sky after the typhoon
When I stand in the street, wearing a pair of dead gutter-rat shoes,
my butterflies blow in from all over even though my body is so
small

244
Why are my arms, my head, my legs, my limbs so distant?

I must have been chased by all the wind in the world and got
wrecked
inside this body
My arms and legs become distant in all directions
my head feels hazy

Since I always lack oxygen, my footsteps move across the tundra

Being on time is my sickness, but I need to go out to be on time

Someone stares into me for a while then flees

My feet are outside of my vision

My feet gradually fade away and

take off like the wolves to the faraway mountains

—Translated by Don Mee Choi

*Starfish [Pulgasal] is the name of a monster from a fable, a monster that can
only be killed by fire. According to the fable, during the Chosŏn period (1392-1910)
when Buddhism was suppressed by King Yi Sŏng-gye, monks were imprisoned.
One monk created an animal from a fleck of rice, and the animal escaped from the
prison and roamed the entire country eating iron bits and became a monster. In
Korean Pulgasal and starfish are homonyms.

245
 Seou l, Kor a 1

The mountain barks

then follows me

The mountain gives birth

The mountain licks a mountain
The mountain’s litter sucks on its nipples
The mountain cold-heartedly discards all its litter
The young mountains copulate in broad daylight, the stench
The mountain roams like a pack of dogs inside a maze

The mountain looks at me with its wet eyes

It trembles as I stroke its neck
The mountain gets dragged away with a rope around its neck
The mountain gets locked up behind bars. It’s beaten. It’s kicked.
It dies.

The mountain eats shit, eats a corpse

The mountain, the mountain full of rashes attacks me with its
flaming eyes
The mountain, the mountain with snow on top cries
The mountain without a single tree laments with its head flung back
towards the sky
The mountain bites and fights a mountain
The mountain, the big mountain chases its own tail

Empire’s military exterminates the mountain that swarms

The mountain that survived, the mountain, the mountain climbs
over a mountain
and runs away

1. Kora refers to a loop of prostrations around the sacred mountain, Mt. Kailash,
Tibet. 

246
It’s still running away

The mountain, the mountain that wants to shed a mountain, brings

its hands together
and stretches them towards the faraway mountain, touches its
forehead, pulls them down to its chest, looks at the faraway
mountain once again as it draws its elbows to its waist, then
bends its right knee, both hands down on the ground, then
bends the left knee, presses down its hands on the ground and
sends them far, far away, then prostrates, its entire body touching
the ground. Then it cries. The mountain circles a mountain,
repeats the whole thing every three steps.

—Translated by Don Mee Choi

247
 Sand Wo ma n

The woman was pulled out of the sand

She was perfectly clean—not a single strand of her hair had gone
bad

They say the woman didn’t eat or sleep after he’d left
She kept her eyes closed
didn’t breathe
yet wasn’t dead

People came and took the woman away

They say people took off her clothes, dipped her in salt water, spread
her thighs
cut her hair and opened her heart

He died in war and

even the country parted somewhere far far away
The woman swallowed her life
didn’t let out her breath to the world
Her eyes didn’t open even when a knife blade busily went in and out
of her

People sewed up the woman and laid her in a glass coffin

The one she waited for didn’t arrive, instead fingers swarmed in
from all directions

The woman hiding in the sand was pulled out

and every day I stared vacantly at her hands spread out on paper
I wanted to ride a camel and run away from this place

248
In every dream the woman followed me
and opened her eyes
the desert inside her eyelids was deeper and wider than the night
sky

—Translated by Don Mee Choi

249