Bashōby David Young [1986]
Tonight, on the other side of the lake, someone is walking with a lantern.
The changing light on the water —a blossom, a wasp, a blowfish— calls me back from desolation and makes me sigh with pleasure.
How can I be so foolish?
*
It’s true! All night I listen to the rain dripping in a basin . . . in the morning I have a haiku. So what!
All these years and I think I know just about nothing: a close-grained man standing in haze by the warm lake hearing the slap of oars and sobbing.
*
For weeks now, months, a year, I have been living here at Unreal Hut trying to decide what delight means and what to do with my loneliness.
Wearing a black robe, weaving around like a bat . . .
*
Fallen persimmon, shriveled chestnut, I see myself too clearly.
A poet named for a banana tree!
Some lines of my own come back: Year after year on the monkey’s face— a monkey mask.
I suppose I know what I want: the calm of a wooden Buddha, the state of mind of that monk who forgot about the snow even as he was sweeping it!
But I can’t run away from the world. I sit and stare for hours at a broken pot or a bruised peach. An owl’s call makes me dance.
I remember a renga we wrote that had some lines by Bonchō: somebody dusts the ashes from a grilled sardine . . . And that’s the poem! That sardine! And when it is, I feel it is the whole world too.
But what does it mean and how can it save you? When my hut burned down I stood there thinking, “Homeless, we’re all of us homeless . . .”
Or all my travels, just so much slogging around in the mire, and all those haiku, squiggles of light in the water . . .
*
Poems change nothing, save nothing.
Should the pupil love the blows of the teacher?
A storm is passing over. Lightning, reflected in the lake, scares me and leaves me speechless.
I can’t turn away from the world but I can go lightly . . .
Along the way small things may still distract me: a crescent moon, a farmer digging for wild potatoes, red pepper pods, a snapped chrysanthemum . . .
Love the teacher, hate the blows.
Standing in mist by the shore, nothing much on my mind . . .
*
Wearing a black robe, weaving around like a bat—
or crossing a wide field wearing a cypress hat!
From Foraging, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1986. Also in Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times: Selected Haiku of Bashō, David Young, trans., New York: Knopf, 2013. See the poet’s 2013 poem by the same name. See also the author’s website. In Moon Woke Me Up Nine Times, David Young writes the following:
Sometime in the eighties I read Makoto Ueda’s biography of Bashō, and that triggered a poem of my own, subsequently collected in Foraging, which I cast in Bashō’s voice. I still think well enough of it (despite my presumption at putting words in the master’s mouth) that I . . . append it to this collection for readers who may be curious. (xv) |