A Little Bit of Zen for a Monday Evening

The mind of the past is ungraspable;
the mind of the future is ungraspable;
the mind of the present is ungraspable.
The Diamond Sutra

Nothing in the cry
of cicadas
suggest they
are about to die.
Basho

At dusk
I often climb
To the peak of Kugami.
Deer bellow,
Their voices
Soaked up by
Piles of maple leaves
Lying undisturbed at
The foot of the mountain.
Ryokan

Homely Verse

In an article in The Guardian, Seamus Heaney wrote, 'Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.'

Here, then, some (in the English and not the American sense), is some homely verse.

Ezra Pound, for underground commuters:

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

For farmers, vine-keepers and others who tend the children of the ground, Basho:

When a cuckoo sings
on a hill, tea-pickers stand
stock-still to listen.


Minosuke Noguchi for watchers of changing seasons:

As I consider each of these beautiful autumn leaves
Wind, stop blowing, until they all fall

Up to yesterday, steeped in autumn's beauty
Then unexpectedly, a snowy landscape


And, in and of itself, home:

Home
Bruce Weigl

I didn't know I was grateful
for such late-autumn
bent-up cornfields

yellow in the after-harvest
sun before the
cold plow turns it all over

into never.
I didn't know
I would enter this music

that translates the world
back into dirt fields
that have always called to me

as if I were a thing
come from the dirt,
like a tuber,

or like a needful boy. End
Lonely days, I believe. End the exiled
and unraveling strangeness.




Dignity in the Home
Betsy Brown

All the chairs and the long brown couch just lay
down on the floor in a line and the thin
curtains joined them, sort of on the side
or fluttering down onto them and I watched
thinking this is the kind of loneliness I
should've known about and this is nonsense: I object.
But the furniture line was so heavy
it went right out the door and some of my
neighbors' lamps joined in, the tails
of extension cords and paths of towels and bedding
went straight down the lawn to the lake where
even my toothbrush and coffee mug with the cats
on it had slunk, so dejected it didn't
even matter they were in the water with some
cold rocks and a clam. All were loaded down
with the despair so poignant in furnishings, each
I tried to coax back into the house, gathering
the alarm clock and frying pan from the lake,
but, almost politely, they moved from
my hands back down to that cold home
with the fierce clam, who guarded them
from my confusion. They were so quiet
about it, I love them. My pajamas floated
with such purpose, reached for the laces of one of my
old tennis shoes out nearly to the reef,
reached without expectation.

Basho x 8 x 3

Basho translated by Peter Beilenson

Moonlight slanting
through all this long bamboo grove
and nightingale song.

Here where a thousand
captains swore grand conquest
Tall grasses their monument.

By lonely roads
this lonely poet marches
into autumn dusk.

Glorious the moon
therefore our thanks, dark clouds
come to rest our necks.

Lady butterfly
perfumes wings by floating
over the orchid.

Spring morning marvel
lovely nameless little hill
on a sea of mist

In my dark winter
lying ill, at last I ask
how fares my neighbor

Old dark sleepy pool
quick unexpected frog
goes plop! Watersplash.

Basho translated by Lucien Stryck

From moon wreathed
bamboo grove,
cuckoo song.

Summer grasses
all that remains
of soldiers dreams.

Not one traveller
braves this road-
autumn night.

Clouds-
a chance to dodge
moonviewing.

Orchid breathing
incense into
butterfly wings.

Spring- through
morning mist
what mountains there?

Autumns end
how does my
neighbour live?

Old pond
leap- splash
a frog.


Basho translated by R H Blyth

Moonlight slants through
The vast bamboo grove:
A cuckoo cries

Ah, summer grasses!
All that remains
Of the warriors dreams.

Along this road
Goes no one;
This autumn evening.

From time to time
The clouds give rest
To the moon beholders..

The butterfly is perfuming
Its wings in the scent
Of the orchid.

Yes, spring has come
This morning a nameless hill
Is shrouded in mist.

It is deep autumn
My neighbor
How does he live, I wonder.

The old pond
A frog jumps in
The sound of water.

And Yet . . .

This world of dew
is a world of dew--
and yet, and yet

Kobayashi Issa's animal poems are memorised by Japanese schoolchildren (who won't encounter Basho and Buson until time has deepened them -- not the poets, who are beyond deepening, but the students, whose bodies may well incorporate the poet's dust as well as words). Issa's life was not without sorrows: his mother died young (young for her and for him), his stepmother was, by all accounts, straight out of a traditional fairy tale, he was financially impoverished, his children predeceased him and his second marriage was a misery (a misery and therefore to misery).

Issa lived from 1763 to 1827 or 8, depending on whom you ask. If you hear about Kobayashi Yataro or Nobuyki (the name his parents gave him), you're hearing about Issa, so it's well to know him by his words and not by name alone. He was born to a farmer in Kashiwabara and studied under a local poet (Shimpo) before moving to Tokyo (which was then Edo) and studying with Mizoguchi Sogan and Norokuan Chikua. He may be a member of the prodigy collection. It's said that he was a child when he wrote

Come play with me,
parentless sparrow.

If Issa had an understandable compassion for the orphaned, he also had an open-eyed appreciation for natural beauty --

Autumn wind --
mountain's shadow
wavers

-- an awareness of inner irony:

All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.

-- and a healthy sense of the wry:

So this is where
I end up living --
five feet of snow.
Where I come from
even flies
bite.

I'm getting ahead of his life. Issa moved to Tokyo when he was fourteen. He may have worked as a clerk in a Buddhist temple, which would have affected his outlook. Certainly, he studied haiku. (For those of you hard-wired to the strictly syllabic translation of haiku -- 5/7/5 -- you might want to close this page. With no ill intention, I am going to offend you.)

He took any job he could find to keep body and soul conjoined until he was accepted by the Kasushika poetry school. Later, he was employed there as a tutor, but the constraints were too narrow and he left. For two years, he travelled. In 1792 changed his name to Issa: a powerful symbolic act in any culture.

He wrote. He acquired a patron, Seibi Natsume and, upon returning to Tokyo, published his first collection. Issa worked in the short form (haiku) and the long (prose). He journeyed around Japan and wrote about his travels. These accounts were published.

His father died at the age of 65 and Issa's step-family disregarded the will. In 1912, Issa returned to his birthplace and his feud with his stepmother and her family. He married. His four children died in infancy. (There's a life in two too-brief sentences.) The poem which opens this entry was written about Issa's daughter. How plaintive: And yet. And yet.

(Yes, he won the contest over the will and inherited his father's lands. I am not having a linear mind.) In 1823, Issa became a widower.

Issa was not without optimism:

Where there are humans,
you'll find flies
and Buddhas.

For reasons of my own, I am taken with

Cold cold
In the eaves
Evening cidadas and red peppers.

I don't like being cold and cicadas send me into a mindspin, they're so unlikely, peppers joy me in arrays of ways, and the contrast of chill and buzz and pepper-clad heat is all together . . . It's clarity. And that's what haiku should do. A satori moment in seventeen syllables, more or less.

Issa's final child, a daughter who lived, was born shortly after Issa's death. His other progeny include over 20,000 haiku, hundreds of tanka and several works of haibun. They, too, survived.