A Memory of the Future Read online

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  in memory of William Gifford

  (1928–2015)

  CONTENTS

  Pome

  ˜˜˜

  life of i

  Cloud Koan

  Riddle

  I

  Zen Sonnet

  The Road

  Ensō

  The Sound of the Sea at the Shore

  Mountains of the Heart

  ˜˜˜

  Light Like Water

  They Drive Through Childhood in Their Little Cars

  The Amiable Child

  March: St. John the Divine

  The Streaming

  Pigeon 7 A.M.

  On Riverside Drive

  Small as a Seed

  She Leans

  Island Graveyard

  Magicicada

  Gold Bug

  ˜˜˜

  The Shrine

  Dream Interrupted—

  Constructing a Religion

  Picture of a Soul

  Small Prayer

  House of String

  Snow, the Novel

  Sake

  Starry Night

  Riddle

  A Memory of the Future

  My Life

  ˜˜˜

  Crab

  ˜˜˜

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Pome

  From flowering gnarled trees

  they come, weighing down

  the branches, dropping

  with a soft sound onto

  the loamy ground. Falling

  and fallen. That’s a pome.

  Common as an apple. Or

  more rare. A quince or pear.

  A knife paring away soft skin

  exposes tart sweet flesh.

  And deeper in, five seeds in a core

  are there to make more pomes.

  Look how it fits in my hand.

  What to do? What to do?

  I could give it to you.

  Or leave it on the table

  with a note both true and untrue:

  Ceci n’est pas un poème.

  I could paint it as a still life,

  a small window of light

  in the top right corner

  (only a dab of the whitest white),

  a place to peer in and watch it

  change and darken as pomes will do.

  O I remember days . . .

  Climbing the branches of a tree

  ripe and heavy with pomes.

  Taking whatever I wanted.

  There were always enough then.

  Always enough.

  There are mountains hidden in marshes,

  mountains hidden in the sky.

  There are mountains hidden in mountains . . .

  mountains hidden in hiddenness.

  Mountains and Rivers Sutra

  MASTER DŌGEN

  life of i

  i.

  i left the capitalhurrying awayi carried nothing

  a dark night before mea dark dark night

  but when morning camei stoodfree & alone

  casting a seven-league shadowwest

  i would go westfollowing the only road

  ii.

  once i lost a ballit was redi watched it

  bouncing down the streetintent on losing itself

  in the tall grassi dream about it still

  & wake up sweatingfrom the nightmare

  iii.

  but if i were deprived of sightof sound

  if i lost my headwhat would i be?

  the question haunts mehow to find myself

  when a self is so smallonly an iota

  of doubt & longinghow to go on?

  iv.

  a poet who believed in meis gone

  but in his poemsi famously live on

  v.

  i met a strangeron the street

  she towered over meshe looked familiar

  but looked at meas if i were the stranger

  it was like lookingin a funhouse mirror

  at a self stretchedbeyond all recognition

  she looked at mewalked on

  v!

  if i stand on my headif i stand on my head

  will you sayi am merelyan empty exclamation?

  vii.

  time is running outon minutesyears

  on what i washave always beeni only wish

  to loveevolveto not misuse

  what i was givennot!

  olittle me

  Cloud Koan

  Clouds have no history, nothing to tell.

  Flying above them or through them,

  we cannot penetrate their calm demeanor.

  Pushed and powered by wind

  (or is there a driving force within them?),

  they do not resist. We do not resist.

  Then turbulence. Turbulence and a flight

  through formlessness until, out of nowhere,

  a blue-green coast appears, reminding us

  the sun never stopped shining. We just didn’t know.

  Questions, so many questions.

  Must one have a name? A face?

  Must events be describable?

  And what is it like to simply

  drift, to have no destination?

  One envies an existence

  without shame or regret.

  As a child I wanted to walk on one,

  heights didn’t bother me then, but now

  I know it would have been impossible,

  like walking on the surface of a star.

  And so, wandering lonely, I go on

  (I must go on), like the rain that falls

  with a faceless force on what’s below,

  wondering if this one or that one

  were to speak, would its words console

  my scattered mind or leave it more bereft?

  Ink. Ink

  on a brush

  held by a hand

  above me,

  beyond me.

  Then I am done.

  Around me,

  white field,

  white sky

  blending to one.

  Where has

  the wind gone?

  And why is there

  no horizon?

  Sentry without

  a shadow,

  I lean a little

  but I do not

  topple.

  To be here.

  To be here

  is enough.

  To say more

  would be to say

  too much.

  Armless, I raise

  my arms

  to heaven.

  Riddle

  Puffed like an adder.

  Deflated like a balloon.

  Tiny or huge, you are

  never the right size.

  A little man or woman,

  you strut, you speak,

  you want. You

  have delusions.

  O little one,

  look at yourself,

  posturing and ridiculous.

  Go now, please go.

  But no, without you,

  what would I be?

  That is the question

  I cannot answer

  until I am changed into

  particle or star, and you,

  you drift away as if you

  had never been there at all.

  You stand so straight and tall

  and from afar you could be

  a column, but up close I can’t tell

  how tall you are. I run my hands

  over your marbly façade,

  hug your cool circumference,

  and remember, or
think I do,

  the day you (I mean I!) came into

  existence. I was on my back,

  naked or nearly so, entertained

  by waggling fingers and toes

  (I didn’t know the words)

  when suddenly, toe in mouth,

  I put it all together—my first

  eureka! moment—and understood

  those fleshy nubs were part of me,

  and I of them (here the pronouns get

  confusing). A shock and a pleasure.

  A feeling of power and terror.

  I haven’t been the same since.

  If I climbed you, not an easy thing

  to do, I could sit on top of you

  the way that flagpole sitters do,

  and have a bird’s-eye view

  of miles and miles around.

  So that is what I’ll do, hand

  over hand I climb and somehow

  reach the top only to see

  how everyone’s thinking aligns

  with mine, everyone astride

  a pillar of his or her own making,

  some near, some far,

  some curious, some hostile,

  but even so, I wave to all

  of them and wait to see

  if they wave back.

  Zen Sonnet

  It was April and we were reading the book about Zen

  you were writing your Zen poems and we were talking

  about the moment we were in and I was thinking thoughts

  that were not Zen: how I know too much too little to teach you

  and then I stepped back from each thought and watched it

  disappear a horse without a rider over a sharp-edged horizon.

  Spring was a pale shade of yellow a green that kept deepening

  there was desire and there was a sense of unfolding and I thought

  how we can do anything there is no need for an excess of feeling

  we can walk through the door that was made for entering and exiting

  abandoning the poems that were never ours though we wrote them

  to the one who walks into this room when we are gone.

  So let us go out into the world and wander a little

  beggars with empty bowls in straw hats grass sandals.

  The Road

  Better a monosyllabic life than a ragged

  and muttered one; let its report be short

  and round like a rifle, so that it may hear

  its own echo in the surrounding silence.

  THOREAU

  A life: pared to the bone.

  Think of a room with no

  chair, no bed. Like a monk,

  I sit on a black square

  in a patch of light.

  In my mind, I sit there.

  Or, a life on the road

  that takes me here, there,

  the trees in fall so bare.

  And I with just

  the rags on my back,

  a gnarled stick to lean on.

  Your life, held next

  to mine, is rich and fat.

  You walk with a pack

  and wear a big straw hat

  that blocks the sun.

  You like things loud,

  loud songs, and beat

  a drum as you walk.

  Hoooo there! you call,

  but I let you pass.

  The days and years

  mount up as I walk on

  toward a word dark

  as night, black as pitch,

  still as a held breath.

  A place where a night

  bird sings. It sounds

  like Keats so I stop.

  I build a fire,

  sleep like the dead,

  dream of a bright star,

  and wake at dawn,

  the sweet bird gone.

  Then rise, splash my face

  from the stream. Up the road,

  a few souls, gray as time,

  stand in a patch of shade,

  their arms held out.

  So it was for this! I think,

  This life, this road! This!

  and run as I have never

  run, back to the beginning,

  the very beginning.

  They are all

  where I left them.

  And there is so much to say.

  Ensō

  zen circles

  Thick. Thin.

  Open. Shut.

  Faint. Dark.

  Blurred. Or not.

  An oval. An oblong.

  An orb. Lopsided.

  Or a zero that

  contains All.

  In one brushstroke,

  one breath, it’s done.

  Perfectly imperfect.

  Or imperfectly perfect.

  Today the paper’s blank,

  but still I see the ensō,

  white on white.

  Again, what is it?

  The face of the unborn.

  The face you’ll have

  when you aren’t

  you anymore.

  In the center of

  this one: a dot.

  Self-portrait

  of what I am

  and am not.

  The Sound of the Sea at the Shore

  As one grows older,

  there should be fewer

  and fewer words to say.

  Each one a few letters

  but taken together

  meaning something large.

  Sea. Sun. Shell. I gather

  a little pile, burying,

  unburying each, or picking

  one up and holding it

  to the sun, thinking,

  too bright, too bright . . .

  It is a game without end

  that I lose myself in

  as the night begins to fall,

  and I shiver a little,

  my life a colorless cloak

  I fancy more and more.

  Like a child I will sit here,

  refusing all entreaties to

  Come in, come in right now . . .

  Can words, a single word,

  save me or anyone?

  I hold one to my ear,

  a roaring shell that says

  neither yes nor no.

  I listen.

  Mountains of the Heart

  an artist’s book drawn by Kameda Bōsai in 1816

  If I were to pray a prayer, would the prayer unfold

  like a scrolling landscape of mountains, rivers, valleys,

  where here, there, a figure sits in calm contemplation,

  praying, composing a poem, or just being there,

  where a boatman poles his slender craft upstream

  against a current trying to take him elsewhere,

  or a solitary traveler walks on a winding mountain path,

  her cloak wrapped tightly around her, her face obscured.

  Here, here, and here, mountains and the ghost of mountains,

  mountains repeating themselves, mountains everywhere,

  and playing over, under, and through it all,

  the sound of a lonely qin, echoing, echoing, echoing.

  *

  Ink on the page. Ink. In Edo two centuries ago,

  on the fifteenth day of the third month, the literati

  had a party. Among ink sticks and laughter,

  sake and toasts, Bōsai drew deep into the night.

  Waking the next morning, wondering, turning

  each sheet over, disbelieving, Bōsai asked,

  “Who drew these things? Who? Not I, Bōsai.

  Not Old Dullard, Great Fool, Lazybones.”

  And who writes these words that follow me

  here, there, like unfamiliar footprints? Who?

  Who am I among all this? Surely not the I

  that stands here now. No, not that I.

  If I am anything, I am only Sage of the Dust,

  Scholar of the Small, Historian of the Drifting Clouds.

&nb
sp; But no, even those names are wrong.

  Call me Muddled Ink Carrier, Lost Traveler

  on a Moonless Night, Mute in a Howling Storm.

  And you who are here beside me, tell me your name,

  not the name of the one who woke in the usual way

  this morning, but the name you have always carried,

  both precious jewel and lodestone, secretly inside you.

  Are you Heart-Flutterer, Bird Hopping on One Foot,

  Fox Dressed as a Monk? Tell me so that we may

  speak freely, from the heart, as we never have before.

  *

  It grows late, later than it has ever been,

  as we pass on narrow mountain passes,

  some bravely going forth, some coming back

  to places of sad and happy remembrance,

  so many paths ascending and descending,

  past pines that make a gentle susurration,

  whispering to any listeners listening,

  Change is unchanging! Change changes all!

  I must leave you now among mountains,

  as the qin plays on and on, its sound advancing

  and retreating, both questioning and sure,

  while we continue on, the seamlessness

  of the present flowing, ever flowing,

  past us like the barest breeze.

  What you are looking for is who is looking.

  FRANCIS OF ASSISI

  Light Like Water

  One season bleeds into another.

  As rivulets form streams, and streams find rivers,

  as rivers lose themselves completely in the sea,

  in March, on the first warm day,

  we lose ourselves in light. Like rain, it falls

  on everyone, the saved and those that aren’t

  completely sure. Light like water.

  Face upturned to the sun, the invalid body,

  no nurse available, drinks with thirst unquenchable.

  Would kneel and give thanks if it could kneel.

  The light is merciful, complete.

  It falls on graves, soaks deep into the earth,

  down and farther down, so that the fingertips of the dead

  begin to tingle, are warmed, and touching dry faces,