Even pine needles are broad, in their earliest stages.
Their present form, now sharpened and firmed,
Traces of the passing chill, creating openings between the leaves, thin slicing forks.
Traces of cold blood passing through reptiles' veins.
The pine needles stiffly turn erect in the bitter cold.
However much the weather warms, they never grow slack.
Like a tongue stretched long, the broad summer breeze,
Pricked and chafed by innumerable pine needles, turns a deep blue, then turns cool.
Even now, the aged pine tree shifts its bark, shredding and bursting its scales,
And rises, meandering into the empty sky.
Below, in the dark and cool earth,
Its roots, wriggling, entangled, crawling, innumerable.
Between sections of the thick bark, split and burst open,
Its clear and cold blood, the pine resin, flows outward.
In an act of penance, this high priest exposes fully the deep ravines of its ribs,
Which have ossified, stiff as semen, within itself.
Pine Tree
Kim Ki-Taek
translated from the Korean by Eun Joo Kim
Listen to the poem read in the original Korean by the author:
Kim Ki-Taek (born 1957) has successfully juggled the life of a salaried man and that of a poet for the past twenty years. In his poetry Kim focuses on human physicality and the relationship between the body and the violence inflicted upon it. He believes that fear and compulsion are integral parts of the human body. Because of this, Kim has been described as "an observer of minute and microscopic details." His major works include Fatal Sleep (1991), Storm in the Eye of a Needle (1994), Office Worker (1999), Cow (2005), Chewing Gum (2009), Splitting, Splitting (2012), and El Chicle, a Spanish translation published in Mexico (2012). He is the recipient of the Kim Soo-young, Hyundai, and Midang literary awards, among others. He teaches poetry writing at Kyung Hee Cyber University, Seoul.
Eun Joo Kim was born in Seoul and grew up in New York. She studied English and American literature at Brandeis University, New York University, and most recently at the University of Minnesota, where she received her Ph.D. She currently teaches at NYU Shanghai.
