This entry is part 2 of 16 in the series Postcards from a Conquistador
Off the map
Hanging around
Bamboo: two poems by Hagiwara Sakutaro
A bamboo-hauling expedition with my friend L. on Saturday prompted me to dig up a couple of Japanese poems by Hagiwara Sakutarô that I translated 20 years ago when I was in college. I couldn’t find the translations I did back then, so I worked from my old notes in the margins of my copy of Tsuki ni hoeru, “Howling at the Moon” (1917), Hagiwara’s first and best-known collection of poems. He’s considered Japan’s first truly modern poet, in part because of the obsessive, neorotic tone on display here. These poems, both entitled “Take” (Bamboo), are the second and third poems in the collection and echo imagery also found in the lead poem, so they were presumably meant to showcase a brand new way of looking at a traditionally poetic thing. While modernism in the West had little over a century of Romantic traditions about nature to contend with, in Japanese poetry, an immense and intricate set of correspondences between natural phenomena and expected emotional reactions made innovation daunting, to say the least.
Bamboo (1)
Out of the ground a straight thing grows,
out of the ground a blue-green pointed thing grows,
piercing the frozen winter,
glimmering green in the morning’s empty road
bringing tears to the eyes,
tears falling even now
from above shoulders swollen with regret,
hazy, the bamboo roots spreading, spreading,
as out of the ground a blue-green blade comes up.
Bamboo (2)
In the shining earth the bamboo grows,
the blue-green bamboo grows,
underground the roots of bamboo grow,
roots that gradually taper off
with fine hairs sprouting from their tips,
hazy fine hairs faintly growing,
faintly trembling.
In the adversarial earth the bamboo grows,
aboveground the sharp bamboo grows,
perfectly straight bamboo grows,
with its rigid joints going rin, rin,
at the base of the blue sky bamboo grows,
bamboo, bamboo, bamboo grows.
Open-faced sandwich
First the crust must be carefully removed from the slice of bread. The peanut butter must be mixed with wildflower honey, or vice-versa. Then the ambrosial spread is ready to be removed from the sandwich, one fingerful at a time — or if that seems too slow, by direct application of tongue to bread. Don’t worry if some of it ends up on the face or in the hair; it can be cleaned out later.
The hard work of chewing becomes easier once the tastebuds have been bribed. Cleared of spread, the bread may be cut into bite-sized pieces to facilitate consumption. The least appetizing part — the crust — is saved for last. Maybe it will be eaten and maybe it won’t.
This is the currently popular train of lunch-time events, and the wooden caboose may be pushed back and forth to help keep it in motion. The black-and-white cow stands in for a docile passenger. And as the wheels turn, the conductor spins, a big grin on his round wooden face.
Thanksgiving
Video link
I went out turkey-stalking this morning, armed only with a camera. Half-way along the old woods road to the Far Field, I found three sets of tracks. The snow was beginning to melt in the strong sunlight, but these looked very fresh. I put the camera on video setting as I approached the last bend.
And there they were. They started running as soon as they saw me. It wasn’t the best view I’ve ever had of wild turkeys by a long shot, but for once I had my camera with me. I was only sorry they didn’t fly. They’re intriguing enough on the ground — there’s definitely still a bit of the dinosaur about them — but when a flock of turkeys takes to the air, it’s a heart-stopping experience. One never expects something so large to fly so well. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to catch that on film someday. (Yes, I know — some of you in the suburbs, where turkeys are never hunted, get much better views.)
When I got to where they’d been, the ground was all scratched up. They’ve spent most of the autumn down in the valley gleaning corn, as usual, but now that turkey season is safely over, the turkeys have moved back up on the mountain. Unlike their domestic cousins, wild turkeys are extremely canny birds. We do allow turkey hunting on our land, but many years go by without a single bird being taken. If our friends are any indication, turkey hunters are a pretty dedicated lot, but sometimes I suspect they’re just looking for an excuse to spend a fine autumn day out in the woods.
The snow was just right for tracking: neither too wet or too dry, too deep or too thin. I crossed paths with ruffed grouse, raccoon, deer, squirrel, and a couple species of mice. But the best find of the morning had to be the very graphic remains of someone else’s Thanksgiving feast — almost certainly a red-tailed hawk’s, judging by the size of the wingprints. Here’s a slideshow of the struggle, in the order I think it unfolded. (Those with slow connections can access the set here.)
As I waited for a shadow to move off the remains of the squirrel, I could hear the twittering of a mixed winter flock of songbirds drawing near. The hawk’s leftovers won’t be going to waste, I think. As for me, I was just grateful for this photographic bounty to share with y’all. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it, and thanks for reading. I don’t know if it makes sense, logically or theologically, for an agnostic to feel blessed, but I’ve never claimed to be a logical person. All I know is my blessings are too many to count.
Don’t tell my heart
If you think you don’t have the skills or software to make something for Postal Poetry, think again. The online image editor Picnik is free and easy to use. You can upload an image and add some text in a matter of minutes. And Jean says the latest version of Picasa has a really easy text tool, as well. You can find many other free options by doing a search for “online image editing.”
Fitting
Winter has come early, it seems. The ground has frozen solid in the unusually cold weather, and instead of November rains we’re getting snow — or, this afternoon, sleet. Long blue shadows remind us that the sun is as low now as it will be in late January.
But it takes some intermittent thawing — or an admixture of ice — to seal the snow cover to the ground. The first snows still lie lightly on the grass and leaves, and can walk away in the tread of a boot, exposing the year’s unfinished business. I get impatient for the pristine midwinter desert. It’s like starting to explore some wild-looking rock outcroppings in a city park, and finding them in use as shelters for a homeless encampment.
Maybe things are better that way, though, all mixed up and impure. Last week I heard the flute-like calls of tundra swans over the roar of the well driller, and it brought me back to the present, standing on the powerline right-of-way on a cold and overcast morning, feeling suddenly that all the broken pieces fit together just the way they were. Everything belongs! It’s a useful illusion to nurture this time of year when our physical separation from the land is brought into such sharp relief, and the cold — not to mention the currently dire economic news — makes us crave comfort foods and fellowship and sentimentalized family holidays.
What if, instead, we were to take the inhuman harshness as a teacher? What if we were to say no to extra comforts and conveniences, no to the random urge, no to commodification? The mere thought is enough to make me shiver. Somewhere one still needs to hear that primal Yes.
The wound
The wound wells like a mirror
with the squandered coins of younger,
more legible selves, which otherwise
would’ve dulled from daily transactions
with weather, lovers, commerce.
A wound is the only way to wear
the heart on the sleeve again.
It salivates, eager to fold in upon itself
& complete the feedback.
The shadow of a butterfly shrinks
& vanishes in the middle of the field
& you turn & raise one hand against the sun,
unreachable in its crown of blazing thorns.
Yggdrasil
I have been capturing darkness from all corners of the sky
& passing it through the negative lightning of my body,
pressing hard with my one free hand to keep the earth
brown & solid beneath us, honeycombed as it is
with metals & aquifers & the pale shapes of our forerunners,
who burgeoned like gastropods from a single foot.
I have been taking notes in the margins
until the book is more mine than anybody’s,
& deserves an altar more than a lectionary.
My millennia of commentaries are dry as punk.
They will flare at the slightest spark & rise on black sails,
astronauts camouflaged against the missing dark matter.
I have inserted myself into your simple narratives,
the foil for your straight man, the chuckleheaded peasant
in your tragedies. My waistline expands like an empire
out to conquer the demons of appetite through assimilation.
The shortest distance bends & blurs. You can’t get
from Point A to Point B without doubling back.
In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is the tree at the center of the cosmos.
Don’t forget to submit tree-related posts to the Festival of the Trees, which will appear next month at the outstanding science blog A Neotropical Savanna — details here.
Haircut
It was a strange morning, one that began with a standard-issue gray sky and birdcalls I couldn’t quite place: a flock of pine siskins moving through the yard, gleaning seeds from the dried goldenrod heads. I had stayed up much too late the night before, watching television images shrunk to a few hundred pixels wide on my computer screen, sitting alone in a dark house and watching the faces of strangers wild with joy or stricken with disbelief. Now I felt a little giddy myself. What had I been dreaming in the intervening few hours? All I could remember were clods of dirt being shaken loose from large rootballs, black fists turning into bouquets of extended fingers, enough tubers to keep us fed for a long cold season.
Was it my imagination, or had the oaks almost all turned brown overnight? Leaves cascaded from their crowns, filling the newly open understorey with motion. A kind of transhumance, I thought, relishing the cognate with humus, which they’d eventually become. Deciduous trees are such masters of renunciation, of yearly sacrifice. If only we could practice the same kind of doing-without! Imagine what that might do for household and national economies, to keep ourselves firmly within such limits. But could we tolerate the kind of suspended animation trees go into each winter? Can we make ourselves as still and stubborn, as smooth and inscrutable, as seemingly inert yet full of vitality as an acorn?
Yes, I think we can. Hell, some of us have been living in a state of suspended animation ever since 2000, when the news media bought into the idea that truth is completely relative, and which year was the last of the millennium could best be decided in the court of public opinion. It felt as if we had entered a fully postmodern, alternate reality in which spin and ignorance triumphed. In that election, a great, if flawed, founding document of the country I live in was grossly violated for the first of what turned out to be many times. Less than a year later, when national disaster struck, we were told that heroism and sacrifice were the special privilege of those in uniform. We were told that anyone who wasn’t with us was against us. We were told to go shopping.
For far too long, Americans have been getting the sorts of presidents we love to hate: narrow selfish preening ignorant bullies. Sons of privilege with smirks on their faces — the kind we seem to elect to almost every office, starting with Class President in Junior High, perhaps because we feel that doing so will make them like us and treat us as equals. But not this time. This time, we’ve elected the weird kid: by his own admission, an outsider as a teenager, one with a funny foreign name and background, the wrong color skin, and bookwormy ways. Like “A Boy Named Sue,” he had to get tough or die — but unlike the protagonist of that song, he learned, he said, that sometimes the toughest thing to do was walk away from a fight, to meet an insult not with the outraged honor of a fragile ego but with implacable calm. And the kids who worked the hardest to elect him? Their energy and lack of cynicism fill me with hope. And not coincidentally, I think, a new and more vigilant, grassroots news media has arisen online. Maybe now we can begin to face some of the hard truths that Americans from all parts of the political spectrum have always been loath to admit.
The sky cleared late in the morning, the temperature climbed past 60 degrees, and the air filled with insects: gnats, wasps, ladybugs, honeybees. I went for a walk, trying to get used to the sensation of air flowing over my scalp. That feeling of a literal weight having been lifted. That newfound sense of vulnerability. The uncanniness of change.
[Edited 11/6/08, after I got a little more sleep]