A spring night in Shokoku-ji

Eight years ago this May

We walked under cherry blossoms

At night in an orchard in Oregon.

All that I wanted then

Is forgotten now, but you.

Here in the night

In a garden of the old capital

I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao

I remember your cool body

Naked under a summer cotton dress.

An autumn morning in Shokoku-ji

Last night watching the Pleiades,

Breath smoking in the moonlight,

Bitter memory like vomit

Choked my throat.

I unrolled a sleeping bag

On mats on the porch

Under thick autumn stars.

In dream you appeared

(Three times in nine years)

Wild, cold, and accusing.

I woke shamed and angry:

The pointless wars of the heart.

Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.

The first time I have

Ever seen them close.

December at Yase

You said, that October,

In the tall dry grass by the orchard

When you chose to be free,

“Again someday, maybe ten years.”

After college I saw you

One time. You were strange.

And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have

Gone by: I’ve always known

where you were—

I might have gone to you

Hoping to win your love back.

You still are single.

I didn’t.

I thought I must make it alone. I

Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,

Does the grave, awed intensity

Of our young love

Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others

All crave and seek for;

We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had

Lived many lives.

And may never now know

If I am a fool

Or have done what my

karma demands.

THE LEVELS

wild cat kittens

born in the ceiling

play sky gods

thundering over the room.

was it claude in the night?

was it thieves?

above our northbound steps

the wild cat brood walks west

a hawk sails over the roof

a snake went under the floor

how can hawks hunt in the rain?

I walk through the hallway:

the soul of a great-bellied cloud.

THE FIRING

for Les Blakebrough and the memory of John Chappell

Bitter blue fingers

Winter nineteen sixty-three A.D.

showa thirty-eight

Over a low pine-covered splay of hills in Shiga

West-south-west of the outlet of Lake Biwa

Domura village set on sandy fans of the sweep

and turn of a river

Draining the rotten-granite hills up Shigaraki

On a nineteen-fifty-seven Honda cycle model C

Rode with some Yamanashi wine “St Neige”

Into the farmyard and the bellowing kiln.

Les & John

In ragged shirts and pants, dried slip

Stuck to with pineneedle, pitch,

dust, hair, woodchips;

Sending the final slivers of yellowy pine

Through peephole white blast glow

No saggars tilting yet and segers bending

neatly in a row—

Even their beards caked up with mud & soot

Firing for fourteen hours. How does she go.

Porcelain & stoneware: cheese dish, twenty cups.

Tokuri. vases, black chawan