dammed self!

what of identity, then?
is it a fixed thing, or fluid?
self, no self, shifting self?

i dilute, like water-color
drop of paint assuaged by water.
but how do i know, then, it's me?

one simple thing: my mouse
goes out, and i am suddenly
without connection, without hands.

my every thought is dammed,
my constant curiosity is still
plugged in yet impotent.

will i disappear? or
spend some time remembering
i will come back, i'm already there.

when connections are severed,
if you feel selfless you are
looking in the wrong direction.

1810

.生て居るばかりぞ我とけしの花
ikite iru bakari zo ware to heshi [no] hana

just being alive
I
and the poppy

Issa

tr. David G. Lanoue

is it wise, or is it nothing at all?

.よ所からはさぞ此島を月見哉
yoso kara wa sazo kono shima wo tsukimi kana

elsewhere, no doubt
someone's viewing this island
this moon

issa

how many moon stories would you tell
if you told all of your moon stories?
have you watched its flirtations?
has it laid balm to your loneliness?

has it been prominent in your arts?
un chien andelou? moonstruck?
is it a symbol, or are you?
was it your only light?

HUNGER MOON

The last full moon of February
stalks the fields;
barbed wire casts a shadow.
Rising slowly,
a beam moved toward the west
stealthily changing position

until now, in the small hours,
across the snow
it advances on my pillow
to wake me,
not rudely like the sun
but with the cocked gun
of silence.

I am alone in a vast room
where a vain woman once slept.
The moon,
in pale buckskins, crouches
on guard beside her bed.

Slowly the light wanes,
the snow will melt
and all the fences thrum
in the spring breeze
but not until that sleeper, trapped
in my body, turns and turns.

Jane Cooper

from The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed.
Copyright © 2000 by Jane Cooper.

think of everyone watching
as you do tonight.

catch a scent of salt

1812

.亡母や海見る度に見る度に
naki haha ya umi miru tabi ni miru tabi ni

my dead mother--
every time I see the ocean
every time...

Issa's mother died when he was a small child. In his diary, this haiku is followed immediately by another ocean poem:

murasaki no kumo ni itsu noru nishi no umi

on purple clouds
when will I set sail?
western sea

In mythic terms, the western sea separates this world from the Pure Land. The ocean, then, is a barrier between this world and the next, keeping Issa separate from his beloved mother.

Issa, translated by David G. Lanoue

OUR VALLEY

We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.

You probably think I'm nuts
saying the mountains
have no word for ocean,
but if you live here
you begin to believe
they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you're thrilled and terrified.

You have to remember this isn't your land.
It belongs to no one,
like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours.
Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in,
and the men
who carved a living from it
only to find themselves
carved down to nothing.
Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

Philip Levine

(c) copyright 2011 Philip Levine

MOTORCYCLE CRASH

DYING MAN (inner voice): Don't look at me so stupidly! Haven't you seen anyone croak before? Shit, is it this easy? I'm lying in a puddle, stinking like an oil tanker. I can't really end up here like a cow shit! Everything so clear! How they stand there gawking at me. The oil puddle...

DYING MAN (Inner voice): Karin, I should have told you yes-terday... This thing got out of control. ...I'm so sorry. Karin! Now I'm lying here. I can't simply... I have to... Karin, there are so many things I still have to do! Karin, Baby, things look bad for me.

DAMIEL
(speaking for the DYING MAN):
As I emerged from the valley out of the fog into the sunshine...
The fire
at the edge of the prairie...
The potatoes in the ashes...
The boat-house
far off at the lake...

DAMIEL and the DYING MAN:
The Southern Cross,
The Far East,
The Great North,
The Wild West,
The Great Bear Lake!

DYING MAN:
The Isles of Tristan de Cunha.
The Mississippi Delta.
Stromboli.
The old houses of Charlottenburg.
Albert Camus.

DYING MAN :
The morning light.
The child's eyes.
Swimming in the waterfall...

(click to see the scene)

VOICE OF THE DYING MAN (off screen):

The flecks of the first raindrops.
The sun.
Bread and wine.
Skipping.
Easter.
The veins of leaves.
The fluttering grass.
The colors of the stones.
The pebbles on the river bed.
The table cloth in the open air.
The dream of the house...

...in the house.
The neighbor asleep in the next room.
Sunday's peacefulness.

The horizon.
The light from the room...

In the garden.
The night flight.

Biking with no hands.

The beautiful stranger.

My father

My mother.
My wife.
My child.


from Wings of Desire

Wim Wenders and Peter Handke 1

small town

why do train whistles, red rooftops,
and abandoned row-boats somehow
make us feel safe, and with our true
souls revealed?

SMALL TOWN

You know.
The light on upstairs
before four every morning. The man
asleep every night before eight.
What programs they watch. Who
traded cars, what keeps the town
moving.
The town knows. You
know. You've known for years over
drugstore coffee. Who hurts, who
loves.
Why, today, in the house
two down from the church, people
you know cannot stop weeping.

Philip Booth

"Small Town" by Philip Booth, from Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999. © Penguin Group, 1999.

1804

.山里や秋の雨夜の遠歩き
yamazato ya aki no ame yo no tô aruki

mountain village--
a rainy autumn evening's
long walk

Issa, translation by David Lanoue

images that should make us feel
lonely instead make us feel whole
and bathed in golden light.

PASSION FOR SOLITUDE

I'm eating a little supper
by the bright window.
The room's already dark,
the sky's starting to turn.
Outside my door,
the quiet roads lead,
after a short walk, to open fields.
I'm eating, watching the sky—
who knows
how many women are eating now. My body is calm:
labor dulls all the senses, and dulls women too.

Outside, after supper,
the stars will come out to touch
the wide plain of the earth.
The stars are alive,
but not worth these cherries,
which I'm eating alone.
I look at the sky, know that lights
already are shining
among rust-red roofs,
noises of people beneath them.
A gulp of my drink,
and my body can taste the life
of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things.
A small dose of silence suffices, and everything's still,
in its true place, just like my body is still.

All things become islands before my senses,
which accept them as a matter of course:
a murmur of silence.
All things in this darkness—
I can know all of them,
just as I know that blood flows in my veins.
The plain is a great flowing of
water through plants,
a supper of all things. Each plant,
and each stone,
lives motionlessly.
I hear my food feeding my veins
with each living thing that this plain provides.

The night doesn't matter. The square patch of sky
whispers all the loud noises to me, and a small star
struggles in emptiness, far from all foods,
from all houses, alien. It isn't enough for itself,
it needs too many companions.
Here in the dark, alone,
my body is calm, it feels it's in charge.

Cesare Pavese

translation by Geoffrey Brock

"Passion for Solitude" from Disaffections:
Complete Poems 1930-1950.
Copyright © 2002 by Cesare Pavese.

it's neighborhood,
being tucked into bed,
the smell of fresh bread,
the human voice,
the slam of the
refrigerator door....

1805

.里の火の古めかしたる月夜哉
sato no hi no furumekashitaru tsuki yo kana

the village fires
old and familiar...
a moonlit night

Issa, translation by David Lanoue

Where am I standing, if I'm to stand still now?

1795

.朧々ふめば水也まよひ道
oboro-oboro fumeba mizu nari mayoi michi

in hazy night
stepping into water...
losing my way

Issa
David G. Lanoue

The season word in this haiku, oboro, refers succinctly to a hazy night of spring. In this uncertain, dreamlike light, Issa steps off a path into water. Hiroshi Kobori notes that the poet's state of mind is like the misty night. He feels insecure and bewildered, aware of the uncertainty of his own future.

According to Lewis Mackenzie, this haiku alludes to the death of one of Issa's friends, a Buddhist priest. On a journey, Issa went to visit him only to find that he had been dead for several years. Mackenzie translates the last phrase, "Ways of delusion!" See The Autumn Wind: A Selection from the Poems of Issa (London: John Murray, 1957; rpt. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1984), 30.

In Saigoku kikô ("Western Provinces Travel Diary") there is an explanatory prescript of which Shinji Ogawa offers this paraphrase: After hearing of his priest friend Sarai's death, Issa begged his replacement for a night's stay at the temple but was refused. Counting on Sarai, he had come over 300 ri (732 miles), "without a soul to lean on, going over the fields and the yards..." See Issa zenshû (Nagano: Shinano Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1976-79) 5.36.

Makoto Ueda reports that Issa found a place to stay that night "just one hundred feet away"; Dew on the Grass: The Life and Poetry of Kobayashi Issa (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2004) 33.

Debi Bender likes the repetition and alliteration in the opening phrase (oboro-oboro). To preserve this subtle music, she suggests this translation:

misty, misty moon
stepping into water
losing my way

Issa, Debi Bender

THE BROKEN SANDAL

Dreamed the thong of my sandal broke.
Nothing to hold it to my foot.
How shall I walk?
Barefoot?
The sharp stones, the dirt. I would
hobble.
And–

Where was I going?
Where was I going I can't
go to now, unless hurting?
Where am I standing, if I'm
to stand still now?

Denise Levertov

t...i...m...e • (the calendars)

IN A DARK TIME

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood —
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks — is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds,
a ragged moon,
And in broad day
the midnight come again!
A man goes far
to find out what he is —
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light,
and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill.
Which I is I?
A fallen man,
I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright © 1963

1813
.久しぶりの顔もって来る燕哉
hisashiburi no kao motte kuru tsubame kana

arriving with faces that say
it's been a long time...
swallows

1821
.世が直る直るとむしもをどり哉
yo ga naoru naoru to mushi mo odori kana

"The world is better!
better!"
the insect dances too

1825
.鳴な虫直る時には世が直る
naku na mushi naoru toki ni wa yo ga naoru

don't sing, insects!
the world will get better
in its own time

1802
.よひ闇の一本榎なくかはづ
yoiyami no ippon enoki naku kawazu

darkening dusk--
in one nettle tree
singing frogs

Issa