Wednesday, May 30, 2007

American "Memorial Day": May 2007

On Memorial Day, I sat on a veranda, above Oike Street, to take my pint of ale in the dusk, reading about American politics. The center doesn't hold there anymore, as an Irish poet once put it when the center didn’t hold where he was. “The best lack all conviction,” he said, “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Only it is Babylon my countrymen are slouching towards & away from now, Mr. Yeats, not Bethlehem. We will see what new fear that brings on. “Patria mia,” is it really, Ezra Pound? “My country”? You were in London when you penned that title in Italian for an expat essay, exporting to Chicago bits of poetry cribbed from China by other hands than yours in Japan when you were just a whelp in "free-silverite" Idaho. “My country”: Well, yes and no, as we Americans say.

The ale goes down too well,

Better, even, than the dusk of May:

Another year gone slack, a loosening of the belt.


Then the friend I was waiting for arrived, and it was off with us up Kiyamachi, forty-odd meters: three glasses of house red & some good talk.






Oike-dori,
by night.

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

The Way of Providence is a Little Rude

We stumbled up and down Mount Ogura in May, talking of nematodes, Japanese beetles, nonsense lyrics, and British Beatles. Vitality, and the nothing that lies behind it, will see to its nematodes, and they to their sawyer beetles, ten thousand to the belly, until even the pines go red in the face, and perish. Emerson is cold comfort here. “The way of Providence is a little rude,” he says. “The snap of the tiger and other bloody leapers and jumpers, the crackle of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda;––these are in the system, and our habits are like theirs.” “Expensive races,” he concludes, meaning “species”: “race living at the expense of race.”

One among our congress spoke very well for the pines of Ogura. And we all spoke up for the mountain proper. The general consensus? Let the nematodes speak for themselves. It is easy enough to dislike their way of making a living, easy enough to discount their point of view.

The pines run a fever,
Bearing the unasked-for burden
Of being alive on Mount Ogura.
That is, until they bear
The unasked-for burden

Of being dead on Mount Ogura.

We kept our eyes to the ground, for the most part: cigarette butts, shards of bottles put to bad use. But we reached the height of our reclamation in two motor-bikes,
one refrigerator, a burnt-out stove, a Mahjong set, and all manner of small tatters. (We left one bicycle behind, for footing.) Then someone said aloud what everyone was thinking: How could a city ignore a thing so big as a mountain? Well, how could it not, given what cities harbor? “Expensive races”: the root of the matter.

Grubbing my way up the slope of Ogura
(Every grubbing man of us leaves his stain),
I heard a festival down the gorge below.

But for what occasion? Spring, was it?

Anyway, having met an old stone conduit to gods long dead, and having knelt with a sleeping tiger, we hauled up the rubbish of another year’s making, layer upon layer: a papier mache mockery of a mountainside. We shot up the scene with our cameras and left the wake of it for the city to cart away in a two-ton truck. Then, having had our fill of the land, we took the low road home. “Kampai,” fellow travelers. “Here's to the nothing that is everything.”

Next May,
When you lope down Ogura
To see that sleeping tiger of a stone,
Don’t fall for him any harder than you must.



From Ogura, toward the gorge.
Click on the photo for a larger image.
N.B. My apologies for liberties
herein taken as to verse.

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FROM JANE

Please send greetings and well-wishes, a poem or two to Edith Shiffert (poet, translator, long time Kyoto resident). Now 91, she has been hospitalized following a broken leg and would welcome correspondence (or visitors) in English.
Edith Shiffert
A-211, Ohara Kinen Byoin
164 Ide, Ohara, Sakyo-ku
Kyoto 601-1246
JAPAN
(Tel 075-744-3121)
A few verses, from “A Grasshopper” (PATHWAYS 2005, White Pine Press):

Still ascending
on mud, withered leaves, bright leaves –
the mountain path.

In the sunlight
Each pine cone
Glistening.

On undisturbed snow
No one is walking,
Tomorrow it will melt.

(Written by Jane Wieman. Tel 075-881-2278, Fax 075-861-6885)

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Trouble in Haikuland

So, our all-mighty, ever-present, benivolent God Google is playing favorites, eh? Some of us can get in, and some cannot. I can write my heart's desires, and you cannot even open this can of worms. Funny. That is, strange. I mean, what is going on? Or: is it possible we have a worm in our midst? Or worse? I dare not write it for fear of awakening its ire to the point where we all are doomed.
But wait. We are poets, right? We thrive on challenges. We are now challenged. Shall we rise to this ocassion, or shall we sink? To whom can we turn, other than ourselves? What is the way out? The way out is the only way we poeds know: write a poem!
Here's one:
mysteries seen, felt, feared
seem real to innocents
but what's true to us: haiku
Take that, you worm!