Embedded Files
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?
THE MATTER OF HUTS
After the setbacks
of Chicago and New York,
he went to Vermont,
to a crushed nine
feet square. Was he proud to
learn that Chomei’s hut
in the mountains near
Kyoto had been “ten feet
square”? Maybe. Who knows?
HISTORY
A long time ago
far back in the obscurest
recesses of time,
a poète 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
THE GRAVE OF RYŌKAN
When my friend Sam went to the temple Ryusen-ji
where the grave of Ryōkan is located
He was, he says, "unspeakably happy" and filled
with an inner lightness,
Which disconcerts me. Have I ever in my life
been unspeakably happy? I don't
Know what it means, certainly not if it
means standing at a grave-site.
Old moldy bones down there. Sam, you are
blessed. And I'm a sad-assed heathenish Yankee.
[Sam is most likely Sam Hamill]
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.
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