Επιμέλεια: Εύα Πετροπούλου Λιανού
I open the deck of the old boat
and lift out the engine, rusted yellow.
The sea, it turns out, was a rugged road.
The engine went putt-putt, bouncing as if over ruts.
My father, while he lived, would dig out that deep sea
with his bare hands, as though mining it —
a man who could tell at a glance, from the swaying surface alone,
everything stirring in the water below.
When the waves rose, he seized the waves.
We ate our shares of the desperate strength
he set against them, and became a family
that grips whatever it holds and will not let go.
I wanted to be, like my father, one who serves the depths,
but depth was always heaving.
So I turned from the low, deep places and climbed,
meaning to become a person of high places
but height, however I climbed it, gasping,
was a place I kept plunging from.
Heavy as your coffin was the day we carried it,
this engine that ran across the furrowed water.
The engine that leapt even waves
swifter than fish and huge as cliffs
has gone cold, cold as you were that day.
If every height on land is named for the sea it stands above,
then height begins at the topmost edge of that depth
which pried the sky away from the sea.
How many meters above the sea was my father?
And how deep the seabed that he mined?
I mean to mend my father’s old and ailing wooden boat,
to sweep the waves aside once more
and dig down to the deep floor of height.
I mean to dredge up my father’s sorrow, bent low with devotion,
settled beneath the wrinkles of the waves
that part height from depth.
I mean to become a person who holds fast to the waves
and heaves harder than the waves.
The engine is silent now,
but search it and somewhere inside
there will still be one small ember,
putt-putting away.
Matryoshka* by Bae Jong-Yeong
Ten whole months
I stayed inside my mother,
and still I do not know her.
And yet my mother,
though she held me a mere ten months,
knows everything there is to know about me.
Vagueness,
that, it seems, is what I learned:
the vague belief that even when the world
felt like a desert island at the far edge of the sky,
my mother would row a wooden boat
and come to me.
That belief was always one-way,
so I did nothing but wait, blindly; I have no memory of drawing near.
A mother no place is without:
I was always that mother’s boundless faith,
and not once did I return it.
Matryoshka, the doll with identical dolls nested layer within layer.
Peeling away mother after mother, I placed me there,
the vague me.
Inside my mother there were always mothers just like her, fold upon fold,
but I was only ever a single layer.
My mother hid mothers inside herself,
fretting they might wear away to nothing,
that the mothers she had left to give might run out.
How many of those mothers, I wonder,
have I steeped and steeped again to live on?
The scars on my body where I tore my mother away —
one day, without warning,
those scars begin to prickle and ache.
Now, however I open my mother,
the mother of all those repeated touches
is nowhere inside her.
*Matryoshka: a traditional Russian wooden doll containing several smaller dolls, one nested inside another.
About the Poet
Bae Jong-yeong
Born in Changnyeong, Gyeongsangnam-do, South Korea
Graduated from Korea University College of Law
Poetry collections: The Runaway Desk and two others
Awards: the Cheongang Literary Award, the Yeosu Maritime Literature Award, the Kangwon Ilbo New Writer’s Contest (Sinchunmunye), among others
Email: [email protected]
