Front Cover

CONTENTS

FAR WEST       I

A Berry Feast

Marin-an

Sixth-Month Song in the Foothills

The Spring

A Walk

Fire in the Hole

Burning the Small Dead

Trail Crew Camp at Bear Valley

Home from the Sierra

Foxtail Pine

A Heifer Clambers Up

August on Sourdough

Oil

The Wipers Secret

Once Only

After Work

Rolling in at Twilight

Hitch Haiku

How to Make Stew in the Pinacate Desert

Sather

For the Boy who was Dodger Point Lookout

FAR EAST       II

Yase: September

Pine River

Vapor Trails

Mt Hiei

Out West

Ami

The Public Bath

A Volcano in Kyushu

Eight Sandbars on the Takano River

Asleep on the Train

Four Poems for Robin

The Levels

The Firing

Work to do Toward Town

Nansen

Six Years

KALI       III

When I went down

Alysoun

To Hell with your Fertility Cult

For a Stone Girl at Sanchi

Robin

North Beach Alba

Could She See the Whole Real World

Night

A Dry Day Just Before the Rainy Season

Another for the Same

This Tokyo

Kyoto Footnote

The Manichaeans

Artemis

Madly Whirling Downhill

Xrist

More Better

For Plants

What Do They Say

The Six Hells of the Engine Room

Maya

Mother of the Buddhas

Wandering the Old, Dirty Countries

On our Way to Khajuraho

Anuradhapura City of the Pleiades

Circumambulating Arunachala

7: VII

Nanao Knows

Lying in Bed on a Late Morning

Looking at Pictures to be Put Away

The Truth like the Belly of a Woman Turning

For John Chappell

How Many Times

Tasting the Snow

Go Round

After Rāmprasād Sen

BACK       IV

The Old Dutch Woman

Nature Green Shit

To the Chinese Comrades

For the West

7.IV.64

Twelve Hours out of New York

Across Lamarck Col

Hop, Skip, and Jump

August was Foggy

Beneath my Hand and Eye the Distant Hills

The Plum Blossom Poem

Through the Smoke Hole

Oysters

MIYAZAWA KENJI       V

Refractive Index

The Snow on Saddle Mountain

Spring and the Ashura

Cloud Semaphore

The Scene

A Break

Dawn

Some Views Concerning the Proposed Site of a National Park

Cow

Floating World Picture: Spring in the Kitagami Mountains

Orders

Distant Labor

The Politicians

Moon, Son of Heaven

Daydreaming on the Trail

The Great Power Line Pole

Pine Needles

Thief

Dedication

FOR KENNETH REXROTH

“. . .So—when was it—I, drawn like blown cloud, couldn’t stop dreaming of roaming, roving the coast up and down …”

—Basho

A BERRY FEAST

For Joyce and Homer Matson

1

Fur the color of mud, the smooth loper

Crapulous old man, a drifter,

Praises! of Coyote the Nasty, the fat

Puppy that abused himself, the ugly gambler,

Bringer of goodies.

In bearshit find it in August,

Neat pile on the fragrant trail, in late

August, perhaps by a Larch tree

Bear has been eating the berries.

high meadow, late summer, snow gone

Blackbear

eating berries, married

To a woman whose breasts bleed

From nursing the half-human cubs.

Somewhere of course there are people

collecting and junking, gibbering all day,

“Where I shoot my arrows