Free You

How will I free you
from tedious city life?
Read Basho’s poems

Grapes

When the grapes are ripe,
I miss you, dead grandfather -
then the first snow comes

Marsh

By the tidal marsh
the wind whispers words of salt –
crabs hide in the ooze

Lustrous

Sky like a bottle
what grapes can match autumn’s light
in lustrous sorrow?

Whisper

Like the sweet whisper
of last year’s cherry blossoms –
this fog on the sea

Chuckle

Morning is cloudy
not yet does heaven’s black bull
chuckle with thunder

First Leaves

First leaves of autumn
drifting like boats of burnt earth
on a sea of green

1972-1973

A poet lost his mind
still he persevered in writing poems

When his mind returned
he did not notice it

specificity of twisted metal,
shattered slabs of concrete,
what once were floors, now
become the weight of death
in a huge savage funeral pyre
still smoking months after
with the flesh of thousands

those two tall slim volumes
reaching up to touch the sky
were destroyed from the sky,
stricken out of powder blue sky,
so they collapsed like books
unable to hold worlds, words
which fragmented to letters

which shattered to shards
so sharp that even thinking
of them cuts, drawing blood
from our foreheads, so we
bleed without understanding,
just the same way we breed,
birth being death’s beginning

thousands died and could
receive no decent burial,
smoked as the heap smoked,
sometimes sent its stench
out to sea, sometimes north
into the city, news more
elemental than a newspaper

A hue
pale and pink
as a tongue
lingers
on the western
horizon.

How did
we learn to speak?

This elm that was in spring
both vase and flowers,

is in November, bare,
a thing alone of ink and air.