Poem of the Week

All along the summer river,
this confused heart —
wild anise and pine.
It’s not a place for rest,
and not for meditation —
It’s a place of endless daydreams,
something flowing underneath reflections on the water.

If you come down to the summer river,
what is it you’ll eat? Clouds, ducks —
reflections of ducks, wild anise and pine.
The river will eat you or spit you out.
Now: not looking at the river, what are you?

Whatever people say I can’t remember.
Trying to get it right I stumble on.
“O cadets of river-shadow —”
and the words arrive.
All night the words arrive like horses, horses
that are gone, and then it’s morning.

Only weeks ago, two of them.
Two stilt-birds, each standing on one leg side by side.
Now, day after day, just one of them comes to stand by the river
and at night returns to the nearby sports-field
to stand alone until dawn.
Is it his loneliness
I feel, or my own?

Now if I come close,
he hobbles away.
Trying to keep him company,
I force him from the shade.
Grown boys tussle, toss balls around,
they’re in college.
He stands at the edge of the world
and waits — or not — for his “friend” to return.

In the morning I wake and find that pity in myself again,
every day dream of this or that.
That’s what the river’s good for:
flowing, taking away.

The miner birds get to harry the magpies.
The magpies close in around the rattletrap doves.
The rattletrap doves run away from footsteps.
The footsteps come to the ginger flowers and stop,
but the ginger flowers don’t notice.

So here they are,
in the joints of bamboo:
the poems I meant to write.

— A type of banana tree
that shares Basho’s name:
its trunk a dull bronze mirror
filled with water long ago.

It’s not a place of daydream,
and not for meditation.
For the crane and the cormorant
it’s a place to catch fish.
Try to meditate here
and you’ll soon be carried off.
The river has no breath in it but it ripples.

Almost afternoon,
and the ducks still sleeping.
Late in the summer
the river closes over.
Dragonflies, leaves
drift all one way —
all leaves, no reflections.

Friends talk about “empathy,”
and I talk back.
We keep drinking, the conversation veers off.
Awake, alone, I lie awake.
All night the argument continues.

The bay tree smells of my old home,
or is it just a past that’s truly past?
The moon is a rock that doesn’t move.
The egret, only whiteness
rippling on the water.
Give me another world —
one made of grass,
cicadas,
the crying in the grass.

A bug flies past. Flies past,
and I understand
what it is to be born.
Next life, I’ll love you again —

The daydream river,
smell of sunwarmed pine.
Talking to myself again —
why wouldn’t I tell the truth?
What I dreamed of
a moment ago.
For a moment,
when I thought I had no other life.