Poetry

The bedroom slippers’ silk linings. The dressing gown of brocade, stitched with the zodiac. The pajamas underneath also made out of silk, for which how many individuals of the species B. mori, having munched the succulent, pale-green mulberry leaves and insinuated a sack wherein to magnify themselves, were steamed to death from the inside out?…

Drizzle of rain pattering on the dwarf palms, dark towers and blue parapets of clouds Over the ruffled blue gingham of the sea, sweet scent of seawrack and fresh life borne on the wind That ambles along the sands and sticks of drift like a nosing poi dog Wig-wagging from the lava rock point along…

While the machine sucks the black suds from my mother’s blood and then sends it back stinking clean into the pistol-tube nailed down into her chest, I climb out of my shoes and slip a cotton swab of water between her teeth, her dentures sliding off the back porch of her mouth. Nobody knows, never…

translated by Clare Cavanagh This year I bore no fruit, just leaves that give no shadows I am afraid, Rabbi, I am afraid, Lord, that I’ll be cursed by him who hungers, weary on the endless road to Jerusalem  

We meet day-plain and inches away, faces facing off in a garden,                                           kissing closed kisses, solemn, bone-dry, and exquisite as the leaves of our sweating faces                                   glisten, sheens giving back each tree’s green. My greenery grows untoward,                    branches burst windows, menace doors, what sky is wide enough to house me?                               Breath…

An Adirondack chair, painted in a primary color, in one corner, under the pergola, the blooming vine appealing above—people an abundance of themselves, prodigal in sunglasses, in the shade. Will I speak to him, and if so, do I call him “Mr. Secretary”? He groans into his chair, opens the Times, reads, then glances at…

translated by Clare Cavanagh I look into her face and see ever more clearly time’s subcutaneous machinations. Death’s terrifying progress. Which will alter nothing in her features, her mouth’s shape, the color of her hair. Nothing, since so little: only this light, this motion, this warmth. Only what isn’t actually there, what can’t be seen,…

Number following number,                                                 oscillations Neatly described, heart’s plunder Or loss, following,                                 that old saw, again and again, And the route taken always is the shortest Between two points,                                    between what must be And that lapsing cloud, a continental Dimming, and then stillness,                                                  and always the afterward, Trying to place it, a…

Basho neither trusted nor distrusted the reeds. He was simply a poet on the way north. And being on the way north, he could choose to ignore them. That sound, after all— wind through them—was not the voice of a master. If there had been a master once, he was gone. Ah, to have loved…