While Reading Bashō

by Hayden Carruth

[excerpts]

COMPARATIVE LITERARY ECONOMICS

Bashō, you made

a living writing haiku?

Wow! Way to go, man.

IT’S TRUE

The night left flowers

of snow in my plum tree. Now

the wind is rising.

NAMES IN THE WIND

Bashō, I like your

real name. Matsuo. Mr.

Matsuo to us.

It has a certain

ring, no? Yes. My real name is

Teddy Roosevelt.

SATURDAY MORNING IN MUNDANE MUNNSVILLE

It’s true, ignorance was . . . well, not exactly

bliss, but at least a comfort. I didn’t know

that a millennium of complicated literary

history, Chinese and Japanese, poetry, fiction,

and copious theory, came before Bashō.

For years I didn’t have to study it.

SHARING

The snow falls. Bashō,

we are very far apart,

and snow is falling.

I’m almost eighty,

and as I watch the meadow’s

brown grass vanishing

beneath this whiteness

how can I not share with you

the poignancy of

passing time?

HISTORY

A long time ago

far back in the obscurest

recesses of time,

a poete innom-

mable murmured his praise to

a twisted sapling

on a mountainside

in Japan, and the scarcely

emergent human

spark of consciousness

brightened like a gleaming leaf

in the forest. No

other occasion

in all our lives has been as

important as this.

INEXPRESSIBILITY

Neither this brilliant

intricate flower on my

hibiscus nor this

clump of words can say

anything at all. Beauty

and sadness guide me,

inexpressible.

I water the hibiscus,

and I play with words.

TEA CEREMONY

I wonder, can you

do it equally well with

vodka martinis

EMPHYSEMA

Had you air, Bashō?

I mean enough to climb those

mountains? Or did you

stop every ten steps,

leaning on your staff and gasping

like a fish ashore?

BAD DAYS

Another awful day. Pain everywhere.

Exhaustion. My spleen and kidneys shaking

from the cold. And yet I was embraced by my

stunningly beautiful woman and by this

long-dead Japanese wonder-poet. Indeed

even on the bad days good things happen.

A WONDER

How astonishing

at ten-thirty when the fog

burns off and reveals

The World!

THE CARVED STONE

Where Bashō had tea

his famous “summer grasses”

swish now in the wind.

SUMMER AFTERNOON

Buddha triumphans.

Meditating trees. Even

the goldfish are still.

Excerpts from “Bashō,” part five of Doctor Jazz, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2001, pages 91, 93–96, 99, and 104.