Miho Nonaka

FLOWERS & ACORNS

A Japanologist
with eyes like barnacles
once said:
You must translate any tree
that produces acorns
as oak.

He’d recite poems about
the full moon, cherry blossoms,
unrequited hearts.
He couldn’t care less about
the trees that produced
different acorns.

I say he was right.
Every language has its
own economy. Still,
the way he spoke of flowers,
moonlight, lovers’ sleeves wet
with tears when parting at dawn—

as though those were
his own sleeves—
made me nervous
after I received
his love poem
in five & seven syllables.

In The Tale of Genji,
Shining Prince keeps courting
new women through his poems,
when in fact his heart yearns for
the mother who died
when he was a baby.

His mostly featureless,
bodiless lovers wait for him
in their twilit rooms,
their long hair flowing this way
or that, uncontrollable
as their own fate.

Do I fancy myself
one of those ladies
named after plants, flowers,
cicada shell, or something more
original, say, acorn, fungus,
barometric pressure?

I want to live more
as an atmosphere
than an actual person,
free of anyone’s impulse
to fetishize thwarted desire
& call it scholarship.

Let the world keep floating,
each of Genji’s tiny lovers hover—
a gossamer-winged butterfly
against the gravity that pulls her
deeper down into the isolation
more cosmic than cosmetic.

MIHO NONAKA is a bilingual poet from Tokyo. She is the author of The Museum of Small Bones (Ashland Poetry Press, 2020) and the Japanese translator of Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (KADOKAWA, 2021). She teaches creative writing at Wheaton College.