THE ISLAND
By Allen Jones
Night falls, walking in the market place
probably about four. The street still wet
from women washing down their stalls.
Everything covered with tarps and ties
and string. The wind soft and swaying,
a distant tinkling of things. Heels click
and scrape on the pavement like a horse,
this memory I’ve never seen before.
Arirang, arirang, arario…
In the harbor below the falls, squid
boats creak and sway, out on the horizon
fishermen pulling up their nets, marking
the world’s end with white lamps.
Just west of the sea wall the rocks take
strange forms. Some flow like water,
skin like the moon, others are monoliths
perfectly square, and one, a child,
playing with her hair. Across the crush
of rattling shore, a high sound echoes
and is returned. Women dive for abalone,
speaking with dolphin tongues, hands
strong as iron hooks. Twenty floating
whicker baskets slowly fill with shell.
Arirang, arirang, arario…
The cliffs are cut by empty caves of war,
half-filled with smooth skipping stones.
A hundred feet offshore, a single finger
rises from the surf. A lover died here,
this metamorphic tower marks the place.
Your father and mother, somewhere
on the shore, but you’re not home.
Arirang, arirang, arario…
Night falls on drummers dressed in white,
yellow, red, and green streamers attached
to hinged poles on their heads. Rising up
on pointed slippers in unison, they rock
and bow, tossing their colored headdresses
twenty feet in perfect arcs. Three becomes
five, then nine, and the rhythm stretches
toward the infinite that is also one.
Arirang, arirang, arario…
Darkness downtown is synthesized music
thumping beneath flourescent lights, smoke
of searing pork, scent of red pepper soup,
blasts of steam from fresh dumplings.
Women giggling in pairs, skitter flat-footed
through dark alleys, flitting from one bright
room to another, dangerous as mermaids,
light as air, their favor neither bought
nor sold, but still a livelihood, constantly
coming and going, promising more
until business men lie down drunk
in the street in their silk suits and weep.
Arirang, arirang, arario…
The mountain road is paved in pine,
walled by basalt, a wall of craters and air,
stacked against the wind by tangerine men
who each day machete back the jungle
as it wraps around fields, barns, and houses
pulling on the legs of the stone grandfathers,
this writhing mass of brush, barb, and leaf,
parting only for the ancestor’s mounded grave,
scissor-cut grass guarded by interlocking
evergreens filled with black hook-nosed birds,
squawking as if death could be called back.
Arirang, arirang, arario…
The sun rises on a poor family’s house,
walls built of black brush strokes, rooms
scented by the tea leaves of emperors,
fingers stained with hand-ground ink,
daily practice slowly moving silks,
a meditation passed from body to body
through war, across famine, under
oppression, a ceremony undoing eternity
to the sound of a piercing reed, a song
everyone knows but no one can explain:
Arirang, arirang, arario…
Someday we will return to the women
of the sea, the marketplace, the volcano,
the star-filled trees. We will find shadows
filled with obsidian, graves overgrown,
women bent and clawed, children gone.
We will open our mouths as if to speak,
move as if swimming against a dream,
or remembering some forgotten dance,
and only half believing, we will sing:
Arirang, arirang, arario…
Long ago, Allen spent a year on Jeju island. One afternoon, trying ludicrously to hike the entire coast, he heard what seemed birdcalls out in the surf. He turned to see Henya surfacing and signaling their safety to each other. It was otherworldly. He is presently a literature professor in Norway.
Korea Lit 