Heir Apparent

Issue #48 October 2019

Softness | Youna Kwak

          I am opposed to the disgraceful modern softness of feeling.

—Nietzsche

Seeing the softness

in me they

harden

-

Relying on the softness

they bend back the wily branch

close to its join, its deep-curved

bend it shall not

snap

-

Pushed me not

to see me fall but

themselves to stand

Pushed me not because

I am rusty but

water’s slow rise

covering their feet

Hanging under an odd swell

to discover its shatter-point

-

When they pushed me I blew back softness

breeze across their cheeks and when I hit

them never in the face they felt only softness-

bones double-fisted fine

absence

When they fell against me it was to feel

the softness in me and know

it was real

When the softness in me glowed like

a torchlight

-

Softness made me scratch it out

burrow it under my pillow

Subjected to softness I drank it down

it burrowed under a gleaming soil,

fragments of mica-fed, a green shoot or more up

through the platform cracks, a new life

excited by

the prospect of new things, a better life,

ease, comfort,

stability, a sense of rightness,

moving forward, staying loose,

soft, unwary, unworried

by softness

blanketed my face and made

my features thin and unknowable-

aglow with excitement

-

I wouldn’t have said

I was always on the verge of never saying

when the multitude-eyes looked past then through

then almost-at askance

Contrary to want softness

tongue-searches then settles

on its character of softness. How it will,

like softness, how it will not

like the others, how it will not tell

what bright face it wears when its hot-ache

to be seen

-

Other times I have a kind of softness

that will blow you away

Beyond the crooked-seam of being pushed

over it presents

its face of desire to mute-lipped observers

Wanting to be seen

did my seen-and-seeing-face blow them

right out the rising waters? While

I cast about

trying to be true

What softness says I shall now endeavor

Searching about for a way to say softness

but I haven’t a clue

Having no clue is

an article of softness, a syntax of stammer

and drown, diction of being

on the verge of never seen

-

Without my softness I would have lost

my pearly name

My reputation built on softness,

no my self-recognition

The boys on the platform singing I think

I recognize that song, I think

I recognize the self, in motion, being

seen, I think I sense the

softness-fatigue of the senses,

slights, then, or encumbrances

their slight oblique striking sideways,

Softness sensing the fatigue

it causes. Slights

or encumbrance actually

many things about softness are

sideways in nature

More than ever softness says:

think before you speak

More than ever the softness says silence

-

The softness was a drag there’s no doubt

Well-liked at parties

Threw back its head with laughter-

full

Having more

friends than it could handle

Softness didn’t know when to quit

-

Softness wore green gloves the color

of money

Two lifetimes I needed,

one invisible and one clearly seen to conjure

everything it needed to survive

Eyes full of stars

but belly emptied of love or recognition my

many-faced softness with only one

name, its pockets

empty of change

It wanted to be more

than it was

naturally, a born

loser naturally wanting

a new face suffused with eager wanting

going out and above and beyond its born capacities

Softness: are you sure?

are you seen? are you capable

of?

-

Nothing comes naturally to softness

Desire present as form,

habituated to envy it

pauses before every answer

unwilling its

fleet footsteps

Softness came before

me will outlast

The boys on the platform singing their song

-

Softness hides nothing not even

strength, a bad

correspondent

Famously unable to keep any secret

I always want to know what it is

they are saying about me

I want to know what I mean

to them, what it means

when they never on the verge of listening

I want to know what it was they

ever saw in me they

looked past and never

I want to know what

cost what kind of

Discretion

a hard softness skin

to be unnoticed

and why should I

tell

-

The boys crowd around me

on the platform singing

My softness made me not

say and

softness stays my hand

-

I never loved so softly

with so much kindness

as when I could not see what I was

loving

or to see if it was deserving

not I the tepid wash of a martyr

but disbelieving of the eyes and

their hardness

-

Despite softness I want

to hear their song

Discretion the hook on which

I hang their lies

But I see and have always,

even cast-off from

the mirror I looked and saw

myself, warrior

and bird

Both had eyes to look out with

-

I tried my best

not to be consumed by jealousy

Jealous of whomever could

look as I look

without having to be me

Jealous of the looking

without the soft life

-

And then the softness in me was a

force to be reckoned with

I was the student of looking

and softness my manual

My indication, my deepest instruction

I looked the way that suffering

pointed until I could

look no further

And softness I saw there

I saw you too amidst the looking

I spent so long on this kind of looking

Softness was the vault I kept

the looking in

Discretion was the shock of

what I could never have

been seen

-

I walked the softness walk and

I heard their boyish song. What goes

walking under skin: words

could not say it. Yet the softness

walking onward as if it could be said

As if we could enter into a soft

world and be made whole there

And yet as long as we are not

dead we must go on living

as if our

living mattered

under the skin

matters

Even though we cannot say it

-

Word-hammer to break

the opacity

But no instrument

to break open softness

-

I heard your boyish song, I drank its

softness-sorrows in and in the everywhere

it had been, I say look softly

and slowly as if understanding were

an autopsy, do you know that softness

no instrument can break will lead us at last

into the forest

of song where I will know you

perfectly

where with no bodies our bodies

were perfect

there in the softness of our

relations

where softness was not an

annex to the real

where what is real is not what

can be touched or injured

but rather what we

cannot live without

-

Nothing can be imagined

that excludes our looking

That which / there are things I am

at a loss to explain

how could you imagine

a room opening onto a corridor

that leads to no place, where

you can never be seen and

no more can I tell

Softness not a matter of

apprehension

Discretion not a matter of

what you know or what is kept from you

-

Relying on softness I buried an

edge into the swell. Softness

the oar and silence the oarlock

A word in from out it was:

please. And: thank you.

And softness spoke. Said:

of course

Not desire but

the harmony

of the hard

-

Softness my assent. Leapt

tsunami over. Delivered me

to the top of the crest, where I could stand apart

watcher-lonely,

outsider angel, the cleverest of all

small, imagined birds