Fable Tree, Tokyo

1.

Wine dissolves the early afternoon. Tall tables fall; marble tops crumble; the words in the room are ricochets. We are consumed by late summer; taken by the inimitabilities of being in this “elsewhere”—on crowded streets that a cat supervises; and in a room where we lose ourselves in absence’s strong lineaments. You turn to face me and I place my arm across your chest. “We have abolished our history,” I say, and you open your palm showing a grain of rice on your lifeline.

2.

Wet leaves are like velvet stepping stones as we look for the storytelling tree in the Nature Institute. I hope it has words underneath its bark, or lines of history like braille on its branches. I imagine you running your fingers over its trunk, finding answers in the ridges and furrows. Kisses take us onwards, until we begin to search each other’s bodies for the stories they tell: shoulders, limbs, reaching fingers. We feel the marks of time and the trajectory of intimacy. You say the storytelling tree was planted in the sixteenth century. We imagine that as our own time, peeling old customs from the narratives of longing until we are naked.

3.

I can see Mt Fuji over your shoulder as your hip bones sit above mine like an equals sign made of skin and bone.