Girl, Your Body Has So Many Holes for Straws
By Kim Hyesoon
Translated by Don Mee Choi
At night black-and-white keyboards mix wildly
Twilight hour like when the blind stare at the sun
I + bird (tied up with a piano string) + music escape from time
and go up the chimney of white beard’s piano repair shop
Girl, how wonderful that there’s music playing nonstop in the universe!
says white beard
Things that crossed I + bird + music’s minds while flying!
People down there work so hard making stuff their whole life, then they pass away
What are they making anyway?
They can’t even launch a single star into space
All they do is cook
wash vegetables
make wheels and
write fan letters to pop singers
I + bird + music
create a universe the size of a bathtub
Splash!
Then
I + bird + music float up
like bird’s transparent death note
Who keeps erasing our bird house up in the air?
A country where nothing gets wet even if it rains
A country without daddies even if daddies arrive
Pianos tightly strung with nerves
have bad toothaches
But I + bird + music say,
This letter is written by our achy hands
we open the endless letter in the distant future
In the desert
rain falls for the first time in 300 years
The seed that had been waiting for it
shoots up to the very tip of the sky
This infinitely sad, distant scenery
a rain-soaked desert, viewed from a telescope
a lone piano
but it’s time, for the thunderous applause to fade
for the cymbals of silence to crash, to announce time’s funeral
for Gliese 581c to open its clenched fists and spread gravity’s fingers
200 trillion kilometers away
I + bird + music lie prostrate like a corpse, hiding at the bottom of a lake, then stand up to shake off water, then lie on a bed of shredded radish and fried glass noodles like a sliced raw fish, panting for air, wearing apricot blossoms behind our ears, then like strewn laundry fall onto the couch barely breathing, then do stuff like cooking, washing vegetables, dragging our chained feet, bleeding.
I + bird + music vomit what we’ve chomped down, the hour of departure is bound to
return, the hour of long-haired tadpoles leaping into frog’s dream is bound to return.
White beard is bound to jabber away
Girl, your body has so many holes for straws
But it’s time to bang on the black-and-white keyboards then a
cool splash! It’s time to untie the birds strung to the piano
Notes:
Read the Korean-language version, "얘야 네 몸엔 빨대를 꽂을 데가 많구나."
Kim Hyesoon, "Girl, Your Body Has So Many Holes for Straws" (Tr. by Don Mee Choi) from Phantom Pain Wings. Copyright © 2023 by Kim Hyesoon. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
