Some of the village's dead --
No one knows how they're chosen --
Wind up in the forest Tatsu-no-mori
You can visit them if you want
They don't speak but seem
Reasonably content. Lately,
An old person from Minamizawa said
That if you go by the forest late at night,
There are two unknown girls
Standing around aimlessly.
Perhaps some other town's
Forest of the dead is full
Or has been closed by the authorities.
In Boston there is an Egyptian ivory statuette
Carved 4000 years ago of a nude woman
Smiling and resembling my grandmother Esther
So I asked her ghost about this. She was pleased
I'd conjured her but said only that whatever
Happens in Ancient Egypt stays in Ancient Egypt.
My mother's death dropped by on her anniversary
To remind me that since she's now eighteen
She has only fifty-two years left
In which to eclipse Sugawara no Michizane
Who became a god seventy years after his death.
"I'm not sure," she said, "what sort of god to be;
Send me some prayers so I can see which ones
I feel like answering."
Something went wrong with the routine operation --
You'd think they'd know by now to call no operation routine --
And I woke by the river among all the poets who've ever been
Meeting at the Orchid Pavillion to drink and write poems
And send empty glasses floating downstream.
My scrawled letters aroused much amusement -- Basho said
"Take away his brush and find him an iPad, someone!"
But even Li Po admired how I held my liquor.
Coating the poem in cold varnish I hung it
Carefully on the drying rack
Not too taut lest the fabric tear; not too loose
Which just asks for sags and puckers.
Tilting my head to the right and looking
From five and a quarter feet away
(As the old men used to recommend)
I saw my father long ago writing a better version,
Piecing it together from odd scraps,
From bits of shattered light, from shadows,
From the echoes of unsaid words,
From memories of opening day
In 1936 when the Dodgers lost
8 to 5, playing the Giants at the Polo Grounds.
It couldn't be that they were both drunk
Since my father never was but somehow
He and Li Po agreed for a season
To trade shadows. Word got around since
Li Po was nine feet tall and his shadow
Taller, even at mid-day. In dreams my father's shadow
Signals urgently sometimes that a glass of rice wine
Or perhaps a bottle wouldn't come amiss.
The dawn comes
Said Li Po
Nonsense!
Said the Moon
I've no intention
Of leaving
While there's wine.
The lord of the center
Never hurries. He rides
A turtle.
The regent of the west
Knows everything. He carries
A noose.
The regent of the east
Is the god to whom gods pray. He rides
An elephant.
The regent of the north
Is rich. Three of his four hands
Are empty.
The regent of the south
Is death. He smiles and carries
A broken staff.
God by His nature is not
To be limited. You say
He is everywhere? Only
If He chooses. He can be
In just one place,
In the Haarlemkirch, say
Sitting behind a pillar,
Telling a marvelous story
Or walking down Eldridge Street
Twelve steps behind my father.
He can be in two or six
Or seventeen places at once.
He can occupy the universe
Or flicker down to being nowhere at all.
(If He can't, what point is there
In being God?)
