that quiet meeting in the mountains

cool and gentle as the muzzles of

three elk, helps keep me sane.

YASE: SEPTEMBER

Old Mrs. Kawabata

cuts down the tall spike weeds—

more in two hours

than I can get done in a day.

out of a mountain

of grass and thistle

she saved five dusty stalks

of ragged wild blue flower

and put them in my kitchen

in a jar.

PINE RIVER

for Tetsu

From the top of

Matsue castle

miles of flat ricefields

hills, and a long lake.

a schoolboy looks through a

home made telescope

over the town.

new stores dwarf

this hilltop tower,

diving dolphins on the

roof like horns—

nobody now quite

knows how they hoisted

huge cut stone.

the Matsudaira family

owned it all,

sat in this windy

lookout spire

in winter: all their

little villages

under snow.

VAPOR TRAILS

Twin streaks twice higher than cumulus,

Precise plane icetracks in the vertical blue

Cloud-flaked light-shot shadow-arcing

Field of all future war, edging off to space.

Young expert U.S. pilots waiting

The day of criss-cross rockets

And white blossoming smoke of bomb,

The air world torn and staggered for these

Specks of brushy land and ant-hill towns—

I stumble on the cobble rockpath,

Passing through temples,

Watching for two-leaf pine

—spotting that design.

in Daitoku-ji

MT. HIEI

I thought I would

sit with the screens back

and sing: watching the

half gone       moon rise late

but my hands were too numb

to play the guitar

the song was cold mist

the wine wouldn’t warm

so I sat at the border

of dark house and moon

in thick coat—seeing stars rise

back of the ridge.

like once when a lookout

I took Aldebaran

for fire.

OUT WEST

In the cross field

all day a new gas cultivator

cough cough       down each row

frizzing the soil, fine chopper “friable”

before it was cucumber,

the boy in a straw hat

clumsily turns at the end of a run

shifting levers,

through deodar limbs come the gas fumes

cucumber vines

poles and straw ropes

torn down, two crops a summer,

last year the family

was out there with hoes,

the old woman dead now?

one-eyed chop tongue rotary

bucks and wheezes,

that straw hat shaped like a stetson

wearing those tight blue jeans.

Kyoto

AMI       24.XII.62

Hair a wild stroke of black

on white

pillow—

knees flexing up playing

white sheets and gown,

gold-brown grass on the hillside

clouds over twisted pine

jabs of rain down from Mt. Hiei

“we never thought he’d be a boy”

nobody home at the house

the father has gone off to teach

the light at the gate is still on

“he’s been printing on broken stone”

thru the window.

lettuce and onions no matter how cold.

does he know? that he has a new boy?

the dog has stoppt barking

sits shivering

and shivering

tied to the woodshed door frame.

THE PUBLIC BATH

the bath-girl

getting dressed, in the mirror,