Sharks
1
On the sea's face, sharks
lie about like logs.
The sharks don't move.
And, positions yielding on their own, they come to lie side by side, athwartwise,
or, far beyond it all, dimly,
float up like balloons;
endlessly gangly, beyond your height,
blue as bamboo, yet muddily dark, salty, dizzying salt water — into it
stone-packed, jagged cans
fall weightlessly, spinning in the water.
The sharks won't bite at you.
Because their stomachs are full.
In the stomachs of these fellows, humans are so packed they almost bulge out.
One arm with its severed part ripened and burst,
parts below the crotch they've bitten off in slow chunks,
pillowlike torsos —
" Don't want nothing, " the sharks, eyes half-closed,
are now drowsy, drowsed.
Irrelevant crosseyes, insidious, fiendish fellows.
The sharks gather outside the white breakwaters of Malacca and Tandjung Priok.
Where the red turnips, the roofs of pilots' offices,
are splashed by the waves from the oil pot.
Corpses.
From where have you brought them in your mouths?
From the kampung on the water, from the mouths of bays,
from the rotten mouths of rivers —
corpses from bubonic plague that float and block the stream. Corpses from fever. Corpses of children.
Corpses with bellies like blue gourds.
Again they wait patiently for a burial at sea,
their harpoon-point snouts glued to ships' hulls.
The sea between Minicoy Island and Africa scorches, suppurates, spouts up mists, purrs deeply, pulls about a biscuit thrown to it, a coffin, plays with it, and smacks its lips.
Corpses.
... Wax-colored corpses that wear out like soap.
Corpses.
... Corpses with not a drop of blood left.
Corpses. Loitering. Drifting corpses.
Corpses kicking about like hydras. Intestines like strings.
Large heads like seashells in which water has collected.
The sharks, like cutting machines, hack them off.
The sharks, lying about,
wait for any length of time for servings of humans.
Their skins are slimy, blue-smelling,
an unpleasant odor, pungent, pierces your head.
Hauled up on deck — the sharks.
Like large ceramic bathtubs,
no heads,
no tails.
But in their familiar seas, they are as colossal as heavy guns, and malignant, muzzles darkly, oppressively, smoldering.
They, like the Mosaic miracle, slit apart the waters of the world with their backs, take a chunk out of the beach as with Death's scythe, emerge majestically, and disappear swiftly.
The shark.
He's a steel blade.
He's the danger of a steel blade. Just sharpened.
A blade's glittering, fine, irritations.
The shark.
He has no heart, he's the brutal one who rides this world.
. . . .
2
Searching for Christians and spices we have reached this place.
These words of Vasco da Gama as he landed in India
are as good as:
— Searching for slaves and plunder we have reached this place.
Jan Pieterszoon Coen built gun bases in Batavia,
Sir Stanford Raffles grasped the gate of Singapore and set up a stronghold to twist the arms of Siam, Japan, and China.
The fleets of these fellows, grown thick and fat like agaves, with white powder all over them,
remain quietly open.
Are warships only kebon simply to make grand spectacles?
Do you say they are defenses for peace?
Are they merely trying to maintain their dignity in solemn fashion?
No, no, no, it's just that for the moment their stomachs are full.
Their stomachs are stuffed with indigestible corpses of human beings,
but impudently enough, they turn their stomachs and signal me, winking a narrow eye.
The sea water is pretty, and bitter. Stings the eye.
Washed, bleached, it smarts.
In this water, shadowlike water spiders.
Coral fragments.
Old guns rusted cinnabar-red.
And the sharks leisurely stretch their large bodies, white as rich Westerners', in this pool.
Cheeks fragrant as grass, as after shaving.
In the water that stretches and shrinks like a magic mirror,
these sharks.
Embarrassing but naked.
Yes. Floating on this prickly salt water,
even the fleets, in the water's reflections and swayings,
all feel ticklish in their bellybuttons.
Through such waves, dizzy,
I'm reeling, holding a black umbrella overhead.
Five years, seven years, soon ten years,
pitiful, fingers bitten off one by one, this part and that part of my body lost, now reduced almost to half,
I am sometimes hurried forward, sometimes left behind, by mysterious currents.
Under the equator, in Sumatra Strait.
People jeer at my lameness, and even for that I depend on them.
What a miserable game. Silly endless circling.
Still, my intestines, rinsed too much in sea water, are too clean, and hurt.
As if wrung, blood oozes.
When those fellows slid by me,
my guts floated up, a puffball, and I lifted my hat a little and greeted in Charlie's style.
But a passing shark's nose nudged me
and turned my direction a little — that was all.
Why don't they eat me?
Does my heart have poison in it?
Does my flesh taste bad? Is it rotten?
They start eating me all right, these days, but as soon as they do, they spit me out.
They do it, just for the fun of it.
Their stomachs are overloaded. They do it to lessen their loads.
They can't possibly have the sensitivity, anything fine like that, of choosing their food.
3
Singapore sits on top
of coke that's just begun to kindle.
Cracked burnt stones, cockspur coconut palms. Hindu kering . Malaysians. Baba Nangking. Ghastly odors of their scorching bodies, these human beings.
Sutra flower blue sky.
Tongkang.
Spitting betel blood — red bedazzlement.
The sharks' nozzles are beginning to suppurate in the Lysol.
Their eyes are scarlet, puffy, swollen.
On white mosquito nets,
on plastered walls,
pale rose geckos dart.
Sweaty, twitching bodies with fast-beating hearts — they wear bracelets of pure gold on them.
A Cantonese girl pushing a makeup ball on her hairless skin.
Siamese women decorated like phoenix-palanquins.
Singapore durians:
their bodies are hot, lethargic, and empty, as they lie about twining around " bamboo-ladies. "
Looking in through the brothels' square bars,
men hurl the worst insults at them.
Turned into maggots of coal, coolies squirm.
Iron roasts. Water sizzles.
Thirsty. Furious. Totally blackened, they carry cement. Boil tar.
In the kaki rumah of the bleak town, they raise feeble whimpers after the Hari Raya Puasa.
They're naked, constructing a battery they'll turn against themselves.
The sharks have chomped arms
off them.
And leisurely turn around them,
mimicking the seven trips around the holy place in Mecca,
making fun of them.
The sharks, like autos, are disgustingly shiny,
and gradually grow in the stinging water.
The nickel-colored water of the Strait of Malacca.
To the breakwaters where the water slides on the boulders just as you might unfurl curled plantain leaves,
the sharks roll their bodies close.
Shadowless fish
and glass shrimp.
Yes. A man's blood or a woman's, blood, in the sea water, is only a drop of port wine.
Sucking on my lips that have lost blood,
this is a woman. Just the same, hers is a bloodless tongue.
— Damn. No one has anything like blood.
The water with a hangover, painful, is washing the wounds
of Singapore, smarting.
4
Where has he drifted from? this capricious, facetious fellow.
Emden —
no, more like a bum. Or,
a floating mine.
In the narrows flickering like numberless fireflies and covered with small wrinkles, he's reeling, from Tandjung Bunga to the Strait of Malacca.
By a difference of one or two millimeters, the sharks' snouts don't touch this explosive as they pass by.
They know;
proud they've cheated him,
they're sneering with eyes like needles.
But this shark had part of his face sliced off slantwise.
He had the face of Governor-General Clifford,
and looked like Hitler, too.
His haughty, insolent, spacious, coarse, totally unreceptive, cruel, blue
whetstone-like profile — the profile says, untroubled:
— You are no loyal citizen. You're no believer, either. You're a drifter.
A beggar. A phony. You're someone at the end of the line.
A woman and a child with me,
I can't make any retort.
The woman's legs get torn off, the child's small ass gets nibbled off.
Threads of white flesh sway in the water.
I shut my eyes tight and threw myself at them.
They're a wall. A barricade called " society " that doesn't accede to anything.
And, over the sea, it's rain.
On the waves, small patterns; a lonesome promenade.
Waiting for a second floating mine,
I was swaying in the waves, as I drifted to some place.
5
I'm now lost outside Telukbetung Port of Sunda, under the equator, in Macassar Bay, in the narrows of Bintan and Batam of the Riau Archipelago, in the water with blue moss-rust floating on it, in the dark water, through the dark seaweed forest.
A river thrust like a kris into the throat of a jungle. Black Death.
Pahang, Batang Hari, Perak Rivers soak nipah palms, push muddy water into the sea,
and sago palms, fallen low, smolder darkly.
In amber pools the color of a plantain leaf,
mosquitoes are clamorously singing.
Customs. That's Pera Anson. Kuala Kubu. Palembang Port.
Rubber rots, crumbles, and turns into a stream of tar.
People can't eat it, can't stuff it in their kayu and suck it in place of candu .
The haaj caps, eyes looking enfeebled,
squat quietly the whole length of the jetty.
As I pass by, watching one port after another,
the sun scorches my head floating on the water after deaths, filth, floods.
Latrines on the water, pickets —
leeches and snakes with fins flap on them.
A blue heron atop a pohon sengon .
On the reddish-brown full water a bleak landscape shows as much as a sash, sitting on top of the water, looking as if about to be overwhelmed by it.
Water surface garish as a reflector.
Those sharks.
Here, too, they follow me.
Their bellies white as a chip of a cup
pass before me in the yellow muddy water.
Their seven cutting edges in a row.
Sharks — they're as persistent as a dog.
Sharks. Weep or laugh — it's no use.
No good to threaten them either.
They run me down till I'm against the wall.
I'm now staggering about in the coral-reef zone off Karimun Lombok at latitude 8┬░ south and longitude 115┬░ east.
Scarlet tortoise-shell dyed in menstruation,
and coral stars like mantles.
Among the waves fine as peacocks
I was drunk.
Acting as if I'd downed too much good peppermint. But that was terrible methyl.
The salt water is bitter. A single butterfly. A Borneo ship is being kneaded.
From Bostiro Timor Island to New Guinea
the sea is utterly, like a virgin forest, deep.
I am lonely as if I entered a wealthy man's salon.
The sea deceives me, deranges me, confuses me.
But I know. Will you stop kidding me. That which floats up to the surface, in the sea, palely white. An abyss. What it is, is the shark.
The shark softly checks up on my body
with his narrow, lozenge-shaped nostrils.
They say all at once:
Friendship. Peace. Love of society.
They then form a column. It's law. Public opinion. Human values.
Shit, again, with that, we fall apart.
6
Ah. Me. Corpse of a corpse. Only, child's soul turning in rebel's will. Body.
A dream that detests normality. Betrayal to coupling, wandering that turns against intimacy. I wouldn't be cured of my anger even if I destroyed this great earth of hurt feelings seven times with a sledgehammer.
Feigning an air of composure, detached from the world that hates me, blames me, laughs at me, and considers me its enemy,
I play on the tottering surface of the sea
and splash over myself the sour water of the rambutan .
Over a view wasted and gone rusty, water without hope, red-hot hardship.
Among spit, piss, and watermelon rinds, from east to south, from south to southwest, me, having grown thoroughly sick and tired of roaming,
ah. Why do I, I, go on roaming?
The woman twines around my arm.
The child clings to my neck.
No matter what, I can't do anything but face up to them.
I'm infirm. But no room for hesitation. No technique of cheating them, no means of playing the coquette for them.
Robbed of everything I had, body torn into shreds, just cocking my head,
I slapped the flesh on my chest, just to see.
Sharks.
Sharks, however, wouldn't move.
With eyes narrow as a topeng 's, they're glaring at us, wall-eyed fashion.
You'll be our food sooner or later — that seems to be what they're saying, but now they're so stuffed they'd have to make an effort just to move their bodies.
In their stomachs, arms and legs of human beings lie about, undigested.
The sharks turn their asses to me, by turns.
On their bodies blue rust forms in places.
Like torn tin-plate funnels,
with dents and warps,
some even have blunt dots here and there,
bullet holes.
And smell offensively of new paint.
Sharks.
Sharks.
Sharks.
Let's curse them. Let's destroy them.
Otherwise, they'll devour us all.
On the sea's face, sharks
lie about like logs.
The sharks don't move.
And, positions yielding on their own, they come to lie side by side, athwartwise,
or, far beyond it all, dimly,
float up like balloons;
endlessly gangly, beyond your height,
blue as bamboo, yet muddily dark, salty, dizzying salt water — into it
stone-packed, jagged cans
fall weightlessly, spinning in the water.
The sharks won't bite at you.
Because their stomachs are full.
In the stomachs of these fellows, humans are so packed they almost bulge out.
One arm with its severed part ripened and burst,
parts below the crotch they've bitten off in slow chunks,
pillowlike torsos —
" Don't want nothing, " the sharks, eyes half-closed,
are now drowsy, drowsed.
Irrelevant crosseyes, insidious, fiendish fellows.
The sharks gather outside the white breakwaters of Malacca and Tandjung Priok.
Where the red turnips, the roofs of pilots' offices,
are splashed by the waves from the oil pot.
Corpses.
From where have you brought them in your mouths?
From the kampung on the water, from the mouths of bays,
from the rotten mouths of rivers —
corpses from bubonic plague that float and block the stream. Corpses from fever. Corpses of children.
Corpses with bellies like blue gourds.
Again they wait patiently for a burial at sea,
their harpoon-point snouts glued to ships' hulls.
The sea between Minicoy Island and Africa scorches, suppurates, spouts up mists, purrs deeply, pulls about a biscuit thrown to it, a coffin, plays with it, and smacks its lips.
Corpses.
... Wax-colored corpses that wear out like soap.
Corpses.
... Corpses with not a drop of blood left.
Corpses. Loitering. Drifting corpses.
Corpses kicking about like hydras. Intestines like strings.
Large heads like seashells in which water has collected.
The sharks, like cutting machines, hack them off.
The sharks, lying about,
wait for any length of time for servings of humans.
Their skins are slimy, blue-smelling,
an unpleasant odor, pungent, pierces your head.
Hauled up on deck — the sharks.
Like large ceramic bathtubs,
no heads,
no tails.
But in their familiar seas, they are as colossal as heavy guns, and malignant, muzzles darkly, oppressively, smoldering.
They, like the Mosaic miracle, slit apart the waters of the world with their backs, take a chunk out of the beach as with Death's scythe, emerge majestically, and disappear swiftly.
The shark.
He's a steel blade.
He's the danger of a steel blade. Just sharpened.
A blade's glittering, fine, irritations.
The shark.
He has no heart, he's the brutal one who rides this world.
. . . .
2
Searching for Christians and spices we have reached this place.
These words of Vasco da Gama as he landed in India
are as good as:
— Searching for slaves and plunder we have reached this place.
Jan Pieterszoon Coen built gun bases in Batavia,
Sir Stanford Raffles grasped the gate of Singapore and set up a stronghold to twist the arms of Siam, Japan, and China.
The fleets of these fellows, grown thick and fat like agaves, with white powder all over them,
remain quietly open.
Are warships only kebon simply to make grand spectacles?
Do you say they are defenses for peace?
Are they merely trying to maintain their dignity in solemn fashion?
No, no, no, it's just that for the moment their stomachs are full.
Their stomachs are stuffed with indigestible corpses of human beings,
but impudently enough, they turn their stomachs and signal me, winking a narrow eye.
The sea water is pretty, and bitter. Stings the eye.
Washed, bleached, it smarts.
In this water, shadowlike water spiders.
Coral fragments.
Old guns rusted cinnabar-red.
And the sharks leisurely stretch their large bodies, white as rich Westerners', in this pool.
Cheeks fragrant as grass, as after shaving.
In the water that stretches and shrinks like a magic mirror,
these sharks.
Embarrassing but naked.
Yes. Floating on this prickly salt water,
even the fleets, in the water's reflections and swayings,
all feel ticklish in their bellybuttons.
Through such waves, dizzy,
I'm reeling, holding a black umbrella overhead.
Five years, seven years, soon ten years,
pitiful, fingers bitten off one by one, this part and that part of my body lost, now reduced almost to half,
I am sometimes hurried forward, sometimes left behind, by mysterious currents.
Under the equator, in Sumatra Strait.
People jeer at my lameness, and even for that I depend on them.
What a miserable game. Silly endless circling.
Still, my intestines, rinsed too much in sea water, are too clean, and hurt.
As if wrung, blood oozes.
When those fellows slid by me,
my guts floated up, a puffball, and I lifted my hat a little and greeted in Charlie's style.
But a passing shark's nose nudged me
and turned my direction a little — that was all.
Why don't they eat me?
Does my heart have poison in it?
Does my flesh taste bad? Is it rotten?
They start eating me all right, these days, but as soon as they do, they spit me out.
They do it, just for the fun of it.
Their stomachs are overloaded. They do it to lessen their loads.
They can't possibly have the sensitivity, anything fine like that, of choosing their food.
3
Singapore sits on top
of coke that's just begun to kindle.
Cracked burnt stones, cockspur coconut palms. Hindu kering . Malaysians. Baba Nangking. Ghastly odors of their scorching bodies, these human beings.
Sutra flower blue sky.
Tongkang.
Spitting betel blood — red bedazzlement.
The sharks' nozzles are beginning to suppurate in the Lysol.
Their eyes are scarlet, puffy, swollen.
On white mosquito nets,
on plastered walls,
pale rose geckos dart.
Sweaty, twitching bodies with fast-beating hearts — they wear bracelets of pure gold on them.
A Cantonese girl pushing a makeup ball on her hairless skin.
Siamese women decorated like phoenix-palanquins.
Singapore durians:
their bodies are hot, lethargic, and empty, as they lie about twining around " bamboo-ladies. "
Looking in through the brothels' square bars,
men hurl the worst insults at them.
Turned into maggots of coal, coolies squirm.
Iron roasts. Water sizzles.
Thirsty. Furious. Totally blackened, they carry cement. Boil tar.
In the kaki rumah of the bleak town, they raise feeble whimpers after the Hari Raya Puasa.
They're naked, constructing a battery they'll turn against themselves.
The sharks have chomped arms
off them.
And leisurely turn around them,
mimicking the seven trips around the holy place in Mecca,
making fun of them.
The sharks, like autos, are disgustingly shiny,
and gradually grow in the stinging water.
The nickel-colored water of the Strait of Malacca.
To the breakwaters where the water slides on the boulders just as you might unfurl curled plantain leaves,
the sharks roll their bodies close.
Shadowless fish
and glass shrimp.
Yes. A man's blood or a woman's, blood, in the sea water, is only a drop of port wine.
Sucking on my lips that have lost blood,
this is a woman. Just the same, hers is a bloodless tongue.
— Damn. No one has anything like blood.
The water with a hangover, painful, is washing the wounds
of Singapore, smarting.
4
Where has he drifted from? this capricious, facetious fellow.
Emden —
no, more like a bum. Or,
a floating mine.
In the narrows flickering like numberless fireflies and covered with small wrinkles, he's reeling, from Tandjung Bunga to the Strait of Malacca.
By a difference of one or two millimeters, the sharks' snouts don't touch this explosive as they pass by.
They know;
proud they've cheated him,
they're sneering with eyes like needles.
But this shark had part of his face sliced off slantwise.
He had the face of Governor-General Clifford,
and looked like Hitler, too.
His haughty, insolent, spacious, coarse, totally unreceptive, cruel, blue
whetstone-like profile — the profile says, untroubled:
— You are no loyal citizen. You're no believer, either. You're a drifter.
A beggar. A phony. You're someone at the end of the line.
A woman and a child with me,
I can't make any retort.
The woman's legs get torn off, the child's small ass gets nibbled off.
Threads of white flesh sway in the water.
I shut my eyes tight and threw myself at them.
They're a wall. A barricade called " society " that doesn't accede to anything.
And, over the sea, it's rain.
On the waves, small patterns; a lonesome promenade.
Waiting for a second floating mine,
I was swaying in the waves, as I drifted to some place.
5
I'm now lost outside Telukbetung Port of Sunda, under the equator, in Macassar Bay, in the narrows of Bintan and Batam of the Riau Archipelago, in the water with blue moss-rust floating on it, in the dark water, through the dark seaweed forest.
A river thrust like a kris into the throat of a jungle. Black Death.
Pahang, Batang Hari, Perak Rivers soak nipah palms, push muddy water into the sea,
and sago palms, fallen low, smolder darkly.
In amber pools the color of a plantain leaf,
mosquitoes are clamorously singing.
Customs. That's Pera Anson. Kuala Kubu. Palembang Port.
Rubber rots, crumbles, and turns into a stream of tar.
People can't eat it, can't stuff it in their kayu and suck it in place of candu .
The haaj caps, eyes looking enfeebled,
squat quietly the whole length of the jetty.
As I pass by, watching one port after another,
the sun scorches my head floating on the water after deaths, filth, floods.
Latrines on the water, pickets —
leeches and snakes with fins flap on them.
A blue heron atop a pohon sengon .
On the reddish-brown full water a bleak landscape shows as much as a sash, sitting on top of the water, looking as if about to be overwhelmed by it.
Water surface garish as a reflector.
Those sharks.
Here, too, they follow me.
Their bellies white as a chip of a cup
pass before me in the yellow muddy water.
Their seven cutting edges in a row.
Sharks — they're as persistent as a dog.
Sharks. Weep or laugh — it's no use.
No good to threaten them either.
They run me down till I'm against the wall.
I'm now staggering about in the coral-reef zone off Karimun Lombok at latitude 8┬░ south and longitude 115┬░ east.
Scarlet tortoise-shell dyed in menstruation,
and coral stars like mantles.
Among the waves fine as peacocks
I was drunk.
Acting as if I'd downed too much good peppermint. But that was terrible methyl.
The salt water is bitter. A single butterfly. A Borneo ship is being kneaded.
From Bostiro Timor Island to New Guinea
the sea is utterly, like a virgin forest, deep.
I am lonely as if I entered a wealthy man's salon.
The sea deceives me, deranges me, confuses me.
But I know. Will you stop kidding me. That which floats up to the surface, in the sea, palely white. An abyss. What it is, is the shark.
The shark softly checks up on my body
with his narrow, lozenge-shaped nostrils.
They say all at once:
Friendship. Peace. Love of society.
They then form a column. It's law. Public opinion. Human values.
Shit, again, with that, we fall apart.
6
Ah. Me. Corpse of a corpse. Only, child's soul turning in rebel's will. Body.
A dream that detests normality. Betrayal to coupling, wandering that turns against intimacy. I wouldn't be cured of my anger even if I destroyed this great earth of hurt feelings seven times with a sledgehammer.
Feigning an air of composure, detached from the world that hates me, blames me, laughs at me, and considers me its enemy,
I play on the tottering surface of the sea
and splash over myself the sour water of the rambutan .
Over a view wasted and gone rusty, water without hope, red-hot hardship.
Among spit, piss, and watermelon rinds, from east to south, from south to southwest, me, having grown thoroughly sick and tired of roaming,
ah. Why do I, I, go on roaming?
The woman twines around my arm.
The child clings to my neck.
No matter what, I can't do anything but face up to them.
I'm infirm. But no room for hesitation. No technique of cheating them, no means of playing the coquette for them.
Robbed of everything I had, body torn into shreds, just cocking my head,
I slapped the flesh on my chest, just to see.
Sharks.
Sharks, however, wouldn't move.
With eyes narrow as a topeng 's, they're glaring at us, wall-eyed fashion.
You'll be our food sooner or later — that seems to be what they're saying, but now they're so stuffed they'd have to make an effort just to move their bodies.
In their stomachs, arms and legs of human beings lie about, undigested.
The sharks turn their asses to me, by turns.
On their bodies blue rust forms in places.
Like torn tin-plate funnels,
with dents and warps,
some even have blunt dots here and there,
bullet holes.
And smell offensively of new paint.
Sharks.
Sharks.
Sharks.
Let's curse them. Let's destroy them.
Otherwise, they'll devour us all.
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