Sunday afternoon, January 27,2019 at 12: 26 p.m.; Monday morning,
January 28 at 9: 23 a.m.
"We wanted everything!
We wanted everything! "
- the refrain of a popular song playing on the radio in January 2019
I.Failed Rhetorics
America?America?We look up:Jets fly
over football stadiums full of expectant fans
and nothing short of victory is acceptable—
Emerson and Whitman passed their legacy
down to us, writers and poets, purveyors of loss.
And a lonely individualism."We are and stay"
here, he said, "face the weather" every day;
"And,being unhappy, talk of happiness."
The small town has given way to the city
and its suburbs, now called "towns" too
where heteogenous populations of strangers
encounter other heterogenous populations ofstrangers,
never to meet again unless there's a location shared,
at which to have coffee and discuss the weather.
Everything left at loose ends. No sense of shared purpose.
America.America. A liberal, democratic rhetoric
that politicians continue to speak, about Americans
living together in community, coming together in service,
but the community, the place itself no longer exists—
amidst all the alienating experiences and confusions.
The rhetoric stays the same, out of touch with reality,
as economic, political, and social forces continue to shape
our lives,the trick being to get us to to believe, to sing
patriotic songs as the jets fly in formation.America,
"images of self-defeating accumulation" crop up
everywhere amidst refusals to identify the sources.
The image.The original.How to tell the difference?
Luxury automobiles, leather furniture, the finest china
and silverware imported and rack after rack after rack
of new and used clothes, the gap, discounted clothing stores
adding to the confusion. Newspapers, television news,
tv news magazine, talk shows—"the Democratic idiom
itself, the language by which America is constituted,
is ceasing to provide an accurate account of the way
things" are.Are. Present tense.Pure pretense.
His first day on the job, they told him not to look down,
to just do his job, his part: the building of the skyscraper.
Down below, a lone tree "was growing from the sidewalk".
The poet termed it "a little life". Then the look back:
Landing.Bare land.300 years ago.America.Vertigo.
II.Farming, Rural Economies
People tend to forget that the world was once based upon agricultural
economies, that people talked about the weather because it mattered as
regards the year's harvest, that people would sometimes greet one another
with words like, "Nice weather today" in lieu of a personal greeting.
At one time, the heads of Japan's largest corporations, upon retirement,
returned to their boyhood homes, farms. They raised crops.They had
a feeling for the land."In Japan today the weather is a neutral, impersonal
topic for everyday conversations with new and old acquaintances."
Rain雨 has remained an important topic of conversation in Japanese life
over the years, especially for people engaged in agriculture as amounts
and types of rainfall can "spell success or disaster for a farmer's
crops", as happens to be the case in every country.The Japanese have
invented many words to delineate different kinds of rainfall, its duration,
etc., some of them being霧雨 or時雨for drizzle or light rain,雨脚 for
a passing shower, 雨続き for consecutive rainy days, and so on. You can
imagine that it rains a lot in Japan: it does at certain times, rainfall being
incredibly important in Japan's rice basket, Tohoku, a region of Honshu north/northeast of Tokyo, just to mention one location.There are even
words in Japanese that designate different umbrellas: one from home,
the office and other locations.
Japan has a rainy season.In Japanese, the word is "tsuyu".梅雨 It's one
of the first words I learned upon relocating to Japan, to the town of Hatano,
about an hour by train southwest of Tokyo.Even at that distance, the area
is densely populated, but farms and orchards intersect towns and cities.
Tangerines grew on the hillside opposite my residence.Hundreds if not
thousand of tangerine trees.I can still see them in my mind's eye.The
word for tangerineis "mikkan".This Chinese character will have to
suffice for now: 柑It refers to citrus.
The rainy season is only about one month in length, consisting mostly of
Drizzle and light rain.It takes place in summer.We tend to think of rainy
seasons as nuisances, but in Japan, and other parts of Asia, the people remind themselves that it's good for the farmers.They did at one time, anyway
Here, in America, wheremechanized, mega-farms are now the rule, run
by large companies and individual farmers who have swallowed up their neighbors' farms, the cash crops are corn, soybeans, pigs, chickens, turkeys,
corn-fed cattle...Farmers keep a constant eye on grain and soybean prices
which seem to dictate almost everything, the quality of the soil,the weather, and rainfall excluded. Silos are kept full.
We once lived on a farm in Iowa.It was what they called an "acreage": two-and-
half acres.It had a barn, a smokehouse, and the farmhouse.There were corn fields and soybean fields on every side—Monsanto, GMOS— and hog farms up the road.Plagues of locust and flies arrived in the fields every summers.Thousand upon thousand of turkeys were housed down the road, their heads sticking out one by one by one by one by one at the food troughs.They never
roamed, and in a short time were butchered.On some farms, hogs lived in large concrete culverts during the incredibly cold winters.All the local streams were polluted from fertilizer runoff.I tried to fish one once, but soon noticed that the fish that remained were disfigured. It was at that point that I came to understand what American farming had become in The Great Midwest.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem