Two Women
/ 1
Travelling along
a freeway in Tokyo
I saw a woman's face
reflected back to us
from a small circular mirror
on the passenger side
of the car in front of us.
The car had a regular
rearview mirror in the center
of the front window.
I wondered what the
circular mirror was doing
on the passenger side of the car.
Her face was in it. She was directly
in front of us. She had a beautiful
face, floating in an
unreal mirror on a Tokyo
freeway.
Her face stayed there for a while
and then floated off
forever in the changing traffic.
/ 2
She moves like a ghost.
She is not alive any more.
She must be in her late sixties.
She is short and squat
like a Japanese stereotype.
She takes care of the lobby
of the hotel. She empties
the ashtrays. She dusts
and mops things. She moves
like a ghost. She has no human
expression.
A few days ago I was standing
beside three Japanese businessmen
peeing in the lavatory.
We each had our own urinal.
She walked in like a ghost and started
mopping the toilet floor around us.
She was totally unaware of us,
standing there urinating.
She was truly a ghost
and we were suddenly ghost pee-ers
as she mopped on
by.
Tokyo
June 21, 1976
źródło: June 30th, June 30th
o źródle i prawach
tekst z archiwum "american dust" (brautiganarchives.xyz); z tomu "June 30th, June 30th" (Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1978)
11.06.2026