One Poem

A few notes on a passage from Yasunari Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness

There are many forms of the present
tense. I can say, I am at the baths, on the phone
with my father, and my father knows I am

at the baths. Whereas, I can say, in writing:
I am at the baths, and the reader might suspect
that the present tense is substituting

for the past, especially as the narrative
continues into what happened then: I move
into the hotter water. A church group is here

with us, bathing in their heavy dark blue garments.
Whereas, I can say, in writing: I am born
prematurely, my lungs still a little suspended

in the hot water of my mother, and the reader
knows, without a doubt, that a substitution
has occurred, the present tense serving

as a translation of the past, translation
having occurred in my attempt to make
the past more urgent and continuous.

In writing, I can say, My paperback gets soaked
on one side from magnesium water
and on the other from light rain that falls in short

increments, the cover lamination resisting
saturation until it doesn’t––the rain like a line
repeated aloud, again and again, memorization

occurring, finally, like a death. And it is clear
to the reader that the rain has already fallen.
The book was already more or less ruined,

though I have finished reading it regardless,
on the train. I have already done the work
of comparing the poetic line to the rain.

∩

Jane Huffman’s (she/her) debut poetry collection, Public Abstract, won the 2023 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. She is a doctoral candidate in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver and has an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, and elsewhere. Jane was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Author’s note: Thanks to H.E. Fisher for inspiring this poem.