Bashō

by Lorine Niedecker

beholds the moon

in the water

He is full

at the port

of Tsuruga

From Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works, edited by Jenny Penberthy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, page 270. Tsuruga is a coastal city on the Sea of Japan, north of Kyoto. The poem was from a previously unpublished manuscript, “The Very Veery,” of June 1969. See also “Alliance,” from which this poem seems to have been revised.