| Reading Bashø to
My Daughter 1. There are characters she says She'll remember forever: the one for horse, for world, The one for fire that looks as if it bursts Into flame. But she'd rather read about frogs, Things still in this world. 2. What promises are held no road is the same, Leaves rush across, ice blackens. Where we go becomes Less known as we approach. The critics retort, "so what's new" But I can't think of any argument they have offered That settles or reassures The claim things of this world disappear, the day bends at the horizon, stars Shift out of the constellations, their stories Breaking into pixels to recombine Into other figures whose stories haven't arrived But are already spinning toward us, their light arcing From distant prominences, past each heliopause, the old arrangements Still flooding past, waiting to be seennothing Disappears, everything ends, caught in passage, Filaments of fire weave into, woven from mountain, horse, world. 3. In the night a frog leaps, Bash says, translated, Into the pond's deep resonance, Best known of his poems notes the commentator Everything becomes commentary, Margins crowded, yet what we look for isn't there: the hills were not very far from the highroad, and scattered with numerous pools. It was the season of a certain species of iris called katsumi. So I went to look for it. I went from pool to pool, asking every soul I met on the way where I could possibly find it, but strangely enough, no one had ever heard of it, and the sun went down before I caught even a glimpse of it. The iris wait, indifferent to us, waiting for The buds to unfurl, the sun heating the ponds insects glance off Ofwe need to be reminded of This, so little time, if we have to be Governed sowhat is the time of iris, of the frog's leap, The pond, crusting at its edges by the height of summer? 4. Then the screen will go blank, before A word is entered, Contact lost. The aspect of metaphors That provides them with energy is that they keep Filling the screenponds dot with duckweed, The water black with silt in suspension, clouds, A heron's shadow. In mid-winter, I saw one crossing The ice-locked marsh crossed-hatched in brown Teezle and cat-tails, the sky pitted with starlings Surging up from a sumac thicket then low across A cornfield left unplowed. The heron, single, A word coming always into the world, Blue as slate, as mid-winter When the world traveled into has wrapped itself Inside its old skins, cold mud, leaf-mats. 5. The world never dormant when you think about itrhizomes Spinning leaf-blades in their starchy flesh, Pond-bottoms in gestation, the mold-black water sluggish, almost ice. The wasp at work at the window, out of season, Tracks across the field's mud and gritty snow-melt, Scabs of buds on the hawthornits fruit black and scattered on the ground Certain constants with their own variables, what's known Always coming undone: the pond's circumference has no measure, Its depth no plumb-line not a representation of uncertainty, But our own movement, stitched between the leap and the sudden Splash, between memory and knowing if knowing is really only an odds-on gamble Of recurrence. Winter light curves along the branches. We're rolling The dice, coming up short. 6. Constellations rise through bare trees, What we wrote a soft cloth over The face of things, Horse mountain world fire Filaments of each character a stroke of memory Assembling again and again on the screen Your figures Horse Mountain World Fire Everything holds its own beginnings, Nothing ever leaves The constellations tracking back, The pond still resonant when Bash left, freshets of iris Running up the mountain side no one visits, in bloom, blue, yellow-ribbed throat, The same we have, waiting, Its rhizomes thickening, pearl buds of leaf-whorls, on the hillside Where in summer lights flick On and off, holding us in that stillness between. The Language Exchange The Campbell Corner Home Page |