SMELL - A POEM BY KIM HYESOON !

Smell
Day Twenty One

Grasshoppers, dragonflies, mosquitoes, and beetles hide
The sky slipslips away high up
The hills roll down to the bo ttom
The frogs leap into the grave
The phone rings
You receive the pitch-black darkness before the call
From the receiver the sound of darkness weeping
the sound of wind escaping
the trembling voice of
torrential rain

Night pours out from the showerhead
As you reach out your hand to the plunging night
the dead birds’ dark blood

The unbearable reign of smell, except in death
The unbearable disease of landscape, except in death

Someone dead sits at the desk and crinkles paper

A cold winter night for the people of the North Pole
They gnaw on birds that have been buried in the ground wrapped
in bearskin
the red birds that smell like their own heads.