Shōren-in ancient calm
butterfly in the bamboo
wistful lotus screens
far away from bustling crowds
I feel my spirit settle

calm serene teien
stone basin bamboo and moss
by the flowing stream
small bee rests on ajisai
the hornet must be sleeping

Jissō-in

hello rock garden
come to ponder your mysteries
just like our first day
resting near the high stone wall
a cricket in mossy green

Ryōan-ji

Orinasu-kan
fabric of a thousand years
stories yet to tell
fragrant old tatami floors
garden freshens in the rain

climbing the steep hill
the waka stone rests serene
in a cedar grove
I thank the poet for hope
and feel a soft breeze answer

Kifune-jinja

Lea Millay
Kyoto, October 2025

We enjoyed a trip through the sites and statues of ancient Europe, all in one giant bath complex! If you can get over the fear of being naked, it’s pretty nice.

Pass through the automatic doors
        and the motion-activated water
jets to a life-size Trevi fountain
        bathed in the blue light the dome

above casts down. But rather than
        throwing a coin to ensure your
return to the Eternal City,
        toss yourself into the pool

of hot water to temporarily
        cleanse yourself of whatever
circumstances brought you here. Date.
        Divorce. Last-ditch attempt

to rekindle a passionate love
        of the Self. Next to the milk bath,
enter the Blue Grotto for a glimpse
        of an airbrushed Tyrrhenian Sea

engulfed in manufactured mist—
        for what is the Real if not
a parlour trick performed by upper
        management? And like Sontag’s sense

of camp, everything here has
        quotation marks around it.
After a brief stop in a bath
        with “Spain’s” plastic bullfighter,

settle beneath four caryatids
        carrying a “Greece” still under
construction (where actual men
        stroke each other off while trying

to avoid the security camera’s
        Cyclopic eye). Tropical fish float
stoically in a murky aquarium
        mimicking our own predicaments

and predilections. And for reasons
        having more to do with space
than time, Michelangelo’s Mary
        emerges from the wall, stripped

of her slain son. Unblinking, she
        stares at us in our mandatory
nakedness with our faults on full
        display—from the way middle age

puts its fingers on the scale
        of the testicles’ balancing act
to stomachs spirited away
        from the unrelenting gaze

of mirrors that want us to see
        we’re not the younger versions
of ourselves we imagine ourselves
        to be. Tangled triangles of pubic

hair float on bodies disembodied
        from themselves sitting in the Salt
Sauna where we rub our skin with
        a purifying grit until the steam

dissolves everything into a cloud
        of visible invisibility and I’m
free to return to the changeroom
        where my valuables are kept

in a locker under lock and key
        for the price of a single coin
that’s returned, spent but somehow
        still the same as when I arrived.

Nathan Mader is the author of the poetry collection The Endless Animal (fineperiodpress, 2024), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His poems have appeared in Plenitude, The Fiddlehead, Kyoto Journal and elsewhere, including The Best Canadian Poetry (Biblioasis). Originally from Saskatchewan in Canada, he currently lives in Kyoto, Japan.

Image credit: Photo-illustration produced by Rick Elizaga using material generated by Firefly Image 5 and Gemini 3 AI models.

Ode to Elemental Breathing

Ode to the Earth
which holds our bodies
no questions asked

Ode to the Water
massaging loosening
our boundaries

Ode to the Fire of Truth
transforming petty self
into comforting Light

Ode to the Wind
stretching the mind
caressing the Universe

Ode to Ether
entwined with my breath…
I sneeze and know you exist.

Earth, Water, Fire, Air. Four elements tied together by the fifth, Ether. Though I have known most of these elements since my childhood days, it was encountering the teachings of the mystic Hazrat Inayat Khan in the late 1970’s that made them a precious part of my life. 

Known to the Inayatiyya as the Purification Breaths* (see Reference Notes below), these simple daily breathing practices, have been a part of my life for 45 years and counting. As I continue doing them, they take me deeper and deeper, create balance, and keep me healthy most of the time. Though it’s a personal practice, it is also universal. More and more, these days I feel the importance of doing these practices for the Earth and Gaia, as a Healing for Humanity. Starting by doing them for myself, the breath flows naturally to a wider world.

Love Letter to Gaia

Gaia Sweet Gaia
I taste your breath
On my lips

Gaia Sweet Gaia
I grab your power
With hands and feet

Gaia Sweet Gaia
I conjure your mind
In my heart

Gaia Sweet Gaia
I rest in your bosom
As if we are lovers

Gaia Sweet Gaia
For me there is
no other.

As a photographer and writer, a gardener and sometimes traveler, I have the good fortune to tune to the actual elements. I live in the countryside in “the other” Kamogawa on the Boso Peninsula, with a big natural garden and a view of the hills and mountains; the ocean is less than 3 kilometers away. My home is in Japan but looks much like the east coast Blue Ridge Mountains in my home birth state of Virginia. Doing these breathing attunements outdoors in the elements is a special blessing. But there are also days when I do them in a hotel room looking out the window or standing on the platform before catching an early morning train. In the 1980’s when I lived in Tokyo, I mostly did them on my morning commute to the station, walking along the Tamagawa Josui canal on a dirt path with big trees. 

Knowing Kyoto for 45 years, it’s easy to see it as conducive to attuning to the elements, whether in the pure nature of the surrounding mountains, the Kamogawa River in the middle of the city, various walks and pathways, or the myriad of shrines, temples and gardens. In fact, they are so entwined, I find it difficult to say which special spot symbolically embodies a particular element the best. Though I gave it some thought for this essay, I know readers will have their own ideas and favorite element-connecting locations.

One of my favorite places is Otagi Nenbutsu-ji on the outskirts of Arashiyama. I like to rent a bicycle at the station to make the mostly uphill journey, a healthy warming up of my elements. I’ve visited many times over the years with a variety of cameras. It’s a very earthy place with big trees hanging on the slopes and lots of stone Buddhas tucked into the mountain hillside. There is not a whole lot of sunlight except at certain hours, which makes that more precious, only trickles of water, but the air is damp and clean, and a feeling of ether-like prayer pervades. Part way into the grounds is a medium-size temple gong. Visitors are encouraged to stand under its roof and ring it, vibrating for peace or your heart’s desire, or both! I always feel refreshed on the way back to “town.”

Kyoto is blessed with so many places to connect with the elements that one can only start by stating the obvious ones like the Philosopher’s Walk, Nanzenji, Daikokuji, the Kamogawa and Takano Rivers, the small water canals here and there (I personally love the Takasegawa Canal area right in the heart of the city life — day or night). With the main area of central Kyoto being flat, it’s quite easy to see a sunrise and sunset without venturing too far. Being attuned to the sun and knowing where the warm sunshine will be on a cold day or shade in the summer, knowing where or when to go to let the wind blow on you or not. I have only experienced one fire festival in Nara, and never seen the mountains and other places in Kyoto “on fire” so I can only imagine the power of those spectacles. I would love to hear what places in Kyoto (and around the world) others find especially connect them to any or all the elements. 

Bringing it all back to earth so to speak, I have shared what I know about these Purification Breaths at writers’ conferences, poetry gatherings, photography workshops, on Nature Meditation walks, and with a variety of activists to help them tune to nature and awaken creativity. I also work as a fashion model and like to think that this attunement to the elements aids my presence before the camera and the viewers of the resulting photos. As a writer, I find that of most of my inspirations come while doing or soon after finishing these morning practices, which in addition to the Purification Breaths, includes prayers and mantras.

I am currently a member of The Japan P.E.N Club. When I heard they had an “environmental committee” I thought to join that, but friends who were on the committee told me, “All they discuss is nuclear issues” — important yes, but not necessarily my focus (though they recently sponsored a lecture on Climate Change which was excellent.) I believe it’s places like these that could be enriched by these simple breathing practices and some other Nature Meditations in addition to their “harder” activism issues. I hope to reach out more to this kind of group and other venues. In the meantime, I keep up the daily practice as much as possible, enjoying what it does to me personally, the people around me, and those far and wide who need our positive energy more than ever.

Spirit of the Elements

Spirit of Earth
deep in the dirt
a grounding flirt

Spirit of Water
for any fool
wet and cool

Spirit of Fire
burns a hole
in my ego

Spirit of Air
blows me away
but here I stay

“Spirit of Ether,”
the breath said to me,
“How can that be?”

Reference Notes:

*Purification Breaths — Elements Breathing Practice

Earth
Breathe in and out through the nose — imagining yourself as a tree helps, breathe in roots down into the earth drawing energy up, breathe out branches up and outwards spreading, fruitful.

Water
Breathe in through the nose, breathe out through the mouth — breathe in touching the source of Water, breathe out Water falling from above.

Fire
Breathe in through mouth, breathe out through the nose — breathe in Fire, breathe out Light. “Burn the ego,” become Light.

Air
Breathe in through the mouth, breathe out though the mouth — the breath as a two-way bridge between Self and the Universe — giving, receiving.

Ether
Breathe gently in and out through nose — the Essence of Being, touch of sacredness, unity, oneness.

Usually done in the morning before eating. Four or five breaths for each element. 

Note: when inhaling and exhaling through the mouth, just open slightly, feeling the breath though the lips. Standing or sitting by an open window or outside is recommended. Each breath’s suggested images are just that, to get one started.

“Salutations” Spoken aloud (optional)

All productive Mother Earth, I humbly offer my homage to Thee**
All purifying Water, I willingly offer my homage to Thee
All consuming Fire, I wholeheartedly offer my homage to Thee
All pervading Air, I gladly offer my homage to Thee
Oh Ether, essence of All, I humbly offer my homage to Thee

(** Feel free to adapt the “old fashioned” Thee as you like.)

Optional hand movements with the salutations:

Earth: Hands by your side, palms down toward the earth
Water: hands above head fingers wiggling mimicking falling water.
Fire: hands raised above the forehead making a triangle shape with the thumb and index fingers.
Wind: hands above forehead, touching and waving gesture.
Ether: Hand clasped in prayer position.

More WiK articles by Edward Levinson: https://writersinkyoto.com/tag/edward-levinson/
Edward’s Photo Website: https://www.edophoto.com 
Edward’s Memoir/Essay book website: https://whisperoftheland.com/

WALKING THE SHORE OF LAKE BIWA NEAR OGOTO ONSEN

BLUE HYDRANGEAS BLASTED

Blue hydrangeas blasted
By headlight after headlight
Next to the expressway
Remain unmoved like
Carnations on the lapels
Of our dead prom kings
The expressionlessness
Of their formal beauty
A cloud of unknowing
That keeps saying nothing
Is everything in the interior
Where fields of flowers
Bloom and the cicadas’
Shed exoskeletons gleam
In memory’s memory
Like gold-plated armor
On the plains of Troy

YOU SAID I SPOKE IN TONGUES WHILE I SLEPT

Nathan Mader is the author of the poetry collection The Endless Animal (2024), published by fine. press and shortlisted for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award. His poems have appeared in Plenitude, The Fiddlehead, Grain, and elsewhere, including The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 (Biblioasis).

Pamela Asai is an Australian visual artist and self-published poet of haiku-inspired verse currently living in Arashiyama. Visit www.pamelaasai.com.au to learn more about her. To see her most recent work, follow pamelaasai on Instagram.

Nathan’s reading from his book included a poem written from the perspective of one of the first two monkeys to return from space, one about hiding in a Whirlpool dryer, and references to putting cherry blossoms, and various other things, in one’s mouth, because, “Isn’t the desire to put the world in your mouth the origin of poetry?”

The event was held on a Friday evening, October 18, 2024, at the Kyoto International Community House (Kokoka) in the beautiful and spacious Japanese annex. 

After reading some poems, Nathan took a few questions and explained that his collection of about 40 poems was written over the last 10 years. The title, “The Endless Animal,” was taken from the body of one of his poems and was chosen in part because looking over his work he saw that animals were a consistent theme.

Asked if the work felt different now that it is published in a book, Nathan said that he felt a kind of grief that he could no longer tweak the poems at will. 

About 20 people attended the event, including some of Nathan’s relatives from Saskatchewan, Canada. A handful of WiK members were there, two of whom took a turn to present poetry. Julian Holmes read from “Waking to Snow,” by Robert McLean. Kirsty Kawano read an original piece. Another poetry lover and a more “poetry-curious” attendee also presented some works.

Nathan’s publisher, fine. press (fineperiodpress.com) funded the evening, which included refreshments. 

＊　　＊　　＊

Basho in Love

who could give a name
to cherry blossom color
or her sudden blush?

*

empty cup
and I’ve done nothing
but think of you

*

third date, fishing—
dragonflies coupling
on tip of the rod

*

the black spaces
between the stars
whisper your name

*

drift of wild cosmos
butterfly and honeybee
exchanging flowers           

Photo Credit: Karen Lee Tawarayama

＊　　＊　　＊

Back in the last millennium John Savoie first came to Japan as a Mombusho English Fellow and went on to teach another five years at Kyoai Gakuen in Maebashi, Gumma. He currently teaches great books, Homer to Basho, at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His first poetry collection, Sehnsucht, has recently won the Prize Americana.

For the full list of this year’s competition winners, click here. For this year’s original competition notice (with prize details), click here.

********************
From the WiK Website:
“In this ‘recollections of poems and trees’, Robert Weis unites two seemingly distant worlds: that of short poems inspired by haiku and that of bonsai trees. Flora and poetry blend naturally on these pages through free verse poems, short prose and photographs, with a single aim: to make us see the beauty within.”

*********************
This little book by Robert Weis, co-editor of the 5th WiK Anthology, The Nature of Kyoto, is a collection of free verse poetry and photographs mainly of bonsai trees (photographs by the author, Jean-Pierre Reitz and Zsuzsanna Gaal), tastefully designed by WiK’s Rick Elizaga. The photographs of venerable yet small bonsai trees dominated my first impression of the book. The photos are not connected by theme to the poems which are juxtaposed with them, at least not to me; there must certainly be a subtle connection, since the photos have been carefully chosen by the author to be next to the poems; and more perceptive readers will be able to find it.

The poetry is mainly about experiences with nature, which Robert Weis has plenty of, both in Japan and many places in Europe. The poems range among such topics as clouds, trees, water. An example, which I particularly liked, is “Tree at the Window” (partially quoted below), which leaves the reader in a pleasant state of doubt whether the poet is referring to a tree outside his window or to a lover who shares his life. Or both.

At each dawn I greet you before I leave you
To find you in the evening on the other side of the mirror
You look like me and I look like you
Day after day we grow roots
In silence
Like the tree in front of the window.

There is an introduction which traces the author’s affection for the Japanese tree Momiji (maple), also loved by the Japanese writer Kawabata Yasunari (who was himself a bonsai aficionado), and an afterword which details involvement with the Bonsai Japanese art form, which is very popular in Europe. True to the name of the present book, Weis expresses large ideas which are embodied in small or miniaturized things.

*********************

Robert Weis was instrumental in setting up in the summer of 2022 a large exhibition in the Luxembourg Natural History Museum of art and photography, “Spirit of Shizen: Japan’s nature through its 72 seasons”. The accompanying catalogue constitutes an anthology featuring essays and contributions by several WiK members. 
He has also published another volume of poetry, Dreams of a Persimmon Eater (January 2023) and also the self-described “travelogue with a personal touch and some spiritual and literary insights”, Return to Kyoto (2023). Though these books are originally published in French, the present work was written originally in English.
He is a “geopoet” whose travels take him to various interesting areas of Europe as well as numerous visits to Japan and Kyoto. The photograph above shows a persimmon bonsai which the author saw in Kyoto in 2019.

 the lake concealing
a million lives, another world
so the mind dreams

afternoon so slow
it feels like the sun has stopped
clouds just hanging

orb of the moon hung
in a sky of palest blue
pink tinge on the hills

ducks glide serene
on the smooth expanse of grey
horizon lost to sky

the lake’s eternal eye
the mountains’ clouded presence
of the centuries

screech from the bushes
a pheasant’s hoarse vocals –
clearing rusty pipes

cormorants flapping
at the clank of construction shovels
the pond shivers

ducks in a flurry
as if running on water
flapping off phantoms

striding past puddles
crows converse across the rain
the playground empty

reeds as still as time
the sun a pale reflection
a fisherman casts

contented stillness
legs as thin as the falling rain
grey heron standing

sharing the garden
with bulbuls*, spiders, wasps, ants
ownership a myth

towering into blue
graceful sway of bamboo
partnering the wind

the way the wind
in waves of light travels through
the spider’s web

wind in the web
rippling a ladder of light –
fragile vanishing

butterfly alights
on my skin for an instant –
weightless transmission

shadows of leaves
move in the wind on the wall –
the language of air

the wind a knife blade
points of silver pierce the sky
the heart song frozen

sudden swoop and cry
hiyodori* chasing spring
in an arc of joy

all the air alive
a breeze, a bird alights
the May leaves quiver

priest sweeps the shrine
in a cliff where water falls
in a line of white

struck by the monk’s rod
from the brass bowl sound quivers
shimmering the air

meditation’s cave –
the dark that sets these ships afloat
flames on the water

Note
*hiyodori (Jap.): brown-eared bulbul, a large greyish songbird, given to exuberant swooping and high-pitched chirping that is said to sound like “hi hi heeyo heeyo”. Hence the Japanese name “hiyodori”, or hiyo bird.

******************

For previous contributions by James Woodham, please see his striking combination of poems and photography here. Or here.  Or here. Or here. Or here. Or here.

deep winter
in the comb tines
a single white hair

whitewater
instead of the bridge
choosing the long way around

the moment you know
the moment mutable
wild cherry blossoms

climbing the steep hill
a pillow of stone offers
deep and dreamless sleep
as wind rustles winter pines 
a clear moon graces the sky

When I was walking alone on Shirakawa near Gion Shinbashi—

clear cold winter’s morn
heron in the quiet stream
longing to return
up into the icy air
wings against the silver moon

Stopping at Seishin-in off Shinkyōgoku-dori—

each time I return
to feel the pulse of ages
beat beneath the new
lone monk chanting the sutras
shadows on a mossy stone

Returning to Daishū-in after many years—

there across the lake
a verandah smooth and still
early morning light
I can’t recall his face now
only the sound of light snow

small glimmer of hope
woven into the fabric
the pattern will show
moonlight in the sky above
stardust in the lake below

************************

Lea writes, ‘In my early twenties I journeyed to Kyoto to teach English at Heian Jogakuin. I lived near Kinkaku-ji and it was during this time that I started Zen meditation at Daishu-in, a sub-temple of Ryōan-ji. Eventually I was able to meet and study with Morinaga Sōkō, the abbot of Daishu-in, and although I was his least promising student, the spirit of his teaching is with me still.

After returning to Seattle, I completed an MA and a PhD in Comparative Literature (Japanese and French) and in the intervening years taught Japanese Literature and Culture at the University level, retiring in the spring of 2022. I live now in Portland, Oregon and thrive with hiking, gardening, practicing taiji, traveling, and writing poetry.’

Alert readers may have noticed that Lea follows the 5-7-5-7-7 syllable pattern that characterises Japanese poems. Here are her thoughts on writing tanka in English:

‘For me writing tanka in English using the 5/7/5/7/7 syllable pattern evolved out of many years of translating Heian-period waka, particularly the poems of Izumi Shikibu. It certainly was not natural at first, but is becoming part of my practice more and more. The biggest obstacle is the kakekotoba (a poetic code word based on homonymy that contains two different meanings, each intended to function as a part of the poem’s imagery and content, which does not exist in English). I have to let this go. Still, I hope there is a resonance for those who have a spiritual connection with Kyoto—present and past.’

I’ve been thinking about tonight’s theme: Words and Music.

Seems to me we are here basically to listen—and to be gently surprised by what we hear.

Mostly we think of things we do as actions, but even taking a walk may be not so much about a transitive physical activity, but more about simply creating an opportunity to look and listen.

Anyone who noticed my ‘Local News’ piece in the recent WiK nature anthology might know that I am particularly into listening. In this spirit, here’s a short follow-up to ‘Local News,’ from a little collection I put together recently with the non-boundary-pushing title of Reflections.

Please don’t think that I imagine this to be a poem. It’s more like an amateur footnote to the Theory of Relativity, as it applies where I most enjoy spending my time:

Moments at Sakahara

Low hills shield Sakahara from the constant hum of Kyoto city. From the fields that we farm, I hear only the sounds emanating within the valley. Close by, water burbling, crickets trilling; over in the forest, birds calling.

Compared to light, sound travels slowly. A thunderclap lags behind the lightning flash; when a jet plane passes far overhead its sound is heard from empty sky somewhere behind it.

A bird call reverberates from the far end of the valley. In those few milliseconds of aural transit, that small flitting bird may have already left the branch it was perched on when it gave voice to the sound that I perceive.

In April, Yuri and I were fortunate to be able to spend some time visiting temples on the Shikoku 88 circuit. Driving, not tramping the hard roads. Part of visiting each temple (we made it as far #36, in Kochi) is chanting the Heart Sutra.

This is a rather wonderful image from the eaves of Anraku-ji, #6. You may be familiar with the famous fundamentalist monkeys seen at Ieyasu’s garish shrine in Nikko. Here is strong evidence of more enlightened monkeys, deep in Japanese monkey counterculture.

Anraku-ji and monkey mind

Anraku–ji (安楽寺, the “Temple of Peaceful Relief”), is notable for, among many sculptural features, a long frieze wood-carving of detailed scenes from the life of Kūkai  (Kobo Daish)i, including this incidental re-envisioning of the traditional image of three wise monkeys, Mizaru, Kikazaru and Iwazaru.

The Heart Sutra says:

Mu gen ni bi zesshin i mu shiki sho ko mi soku ho

—No eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or mind; no form, sound, smell, taste, touch, or mind object.

But what do monkeys know?

Seeking wisdom in the celestial persimmon orchard, these three aging monkeys have found a book, perhaps an exposition of the Dharma. Can they read it?

Who knows?

In some way they have awakened. Eager now to hear more, see more, and to debate more on the nature of wisdom, will they attain full enlightenment?

All things are possible.

The Heart Sutra also says:

Mu chi yaku mu toku i mu sho toku ko

—There is no wisdom, nor is there attainment, for there is nothing to be attained.

Monkey minds (like mine) love enigmatic wordplay.

Maybe the Heart Sutra was written (and translated) by monkeys?

Who knows?

Finally, a further reflection on openness, receptiveness:

I’ve had this wonderful anthology of Japanese poetry, From the Country of Eight Islands, ever since a blockbuster ‘going out of business’ sale at Friends World College. Somehow, I only recently noticed that it was originally donated to FWC by a Kyoto nature poet, the one-and-only Edith Shiffert, who resided here for over 50 years, from 1963 until her death in 2017, at the age of 101. We recently included several of her poems in the Flora & Kyoto issue of Kyoto Journal, including this opening quote, from The Forest Within the Gate, Heian-kyo Media/White Pine Press, 2014:

With the entire earth
drenched in flowers and fragrance
why not peace and joy?

The book contains a typed postcard dated May 27, 1981, from Burton Watson, one of the translators, and had been sent out as a complimentary copy, in respect. I’ve heard the other translator, Hiroaki Sato, was a former student of Edith’s. I assume Edith had donated this volume when she was forced to dispose of possessions when moving with her elderly husband, Minoru, to a care home.

What makes this collection of translations most deeply meaningful to me, is finding Edith’s annotations, and especially the insertion of a simple bookmark in Thomas Rimer’s introduction. This means we can virtually read over Edith’s shoulder, notably where Rimer discusses the aesthetic of Yūgen, in which “a poem was intended to remain grounded in one level on a directly felt observation of nature, behind or beyond which some intimation of the existence of a different or higher reality was suggested.”

Rimer reminds us that this essential aesthetic embedding of nature in Japanese poetry (and vice versa) has in fact been transmitted through literary history to the present. It is easy to imagine Edith finding particular resonance in discussion of the place of nature in transcendent poetry. Writing was indeed her Buddhist practice. This meditative, essentially timeless and intensely personal embeddedness was evident in most of her work, including this poem, also republished in Flora & Kyoto, originally from her book In the Ninth Decade, White Pine Press, 2005:

Shinnyodo, Yoshidayama, Graveyards

This stone Buddha too
is circled with cherry blossoms.
The sky looks empty.

Red camellias and cherry petals have fallen
over all the ground
and on the stone Buddhas.
Petals on my shoulders too.

Temple roofs too high
for drifting cherry petals,
clear sky above them.

In this vast graveyard
names meaningless, individuals nothing,
all their spent energies gone,
just ashes, of thousands from a thousand years,
quieted under the vast ephemeral space of sky
now knowing that much we fret about
is absolutely inconsequential.
Existence and beloved places, all vanishing.

Grace, grace, afloat on that only
we are blown about gently
like these dispersed and vanishing
flower fragments.

Thank you for listening…

Ken Rodgers has been managing editor of Kyoto Journal since 1993, and a member of WiK since it originated in 2013.

Haiku and photos

Winter

Interminable queues
of displaced people—                                                
blizzard-ridden road                                                      
 
Mother and baby                                                        
carried off by the attacks—                                       
trampled winter roses                                                  
 
 War turns gentle siblings                             
into crazed soldiers—                                  
a frozen battlefield                                                    
 
 Soldiers loot,                                                              
for their loved ones…                                                
furious snowstorm                                                       
 
A doll in red                                                                
on a muddy snowmelt road —                            
immobilized tanks                                                         
 
Raging winter rain                                                      
to the ashen landscape—                            
endless tears                                                               
 
Evacuees’ singing                                               
echoes through the frozen air—                  
the Snow Queen’s “Let it go” 

Spring

 
The spring sun   
to both Ukraine and Russia—
more tears, more sorrows
 
Even plant buds　　　　　　　　　　　　　
have been scorched—                                        
silent devastation                                                      
 
Spring rain—                                                 　　　
the shattered dreams of                              
a young soldier                                             
 
New grass time and again                  
trampled down—                           
yet still it keeps growing                
 
Sunflower seeds                                  
sown in a battlefield—                                      
longing for summer          
 
 
And… again, winter

Soldiers’ mums
stand against the Ukraine war—
winter comes again
 
Chess pieces
Scattered on a snowy road—
the battles continue
 
New Year’s greetings
from the battlefield…
smiles and tears
 
On a New Year ’s Day—
a white pigeon takes off
towards a rainbow

WiK member Milena Guziak is a leading trainer worldwide of guides for shinrin yoku (forest bathing). To understand more about the practice, please see her ‘Mindful tourist’ website here. Below is a selection of poems, written in Japanese and translated by herself, that have been inspired by the prolonged periods of immersion in nature involved in her practice.

————–

折れた心
優しくなおる
森の中

oreta kokoro
yasashiku naoru
mori no naka

a broken heart
gently recovers
in the forest

—————

新年祝え
見る四季の変化
人生なのさ

shinnen iwae
miru shiki no henka
jinsei na no sa

i greet the new year
the changes of seasons i see
this is how it goes

————-

風が吹いている
花びらが落ちている
私は見ている
頰に触っている風が
私にほほ笑みかけている
心が嬉しくなっている

the wind is blowing
flower petals are falling
I’m watching
the wind that is touching my cheeks
is smiling at me

————

探しの心

ある雨の日、心は心に質問した。
「探しのは何か」「静けさです」と心は答えると、
「道が分からなくなっているじゃないか」 と寂しく言われてしまった。

a searching mind

one rainy day, the mind asked itself “what are you searching for?”
“stillness” – replied the mind
“aren’t you losing your way?” – said the mind sorrowfully

*********************

For collections of Milena’s poems, available on amazon, please click this link.
For Milena’s training programme, see here; for her Facebook page click here; and for Instagram take a look here.

There once was this cheeky young geisha
So cheeky she’d even surprise ya
She would look here and there
When she was pouring your beer
And “accidentally” spill it all over ya

There once was a geiko so old
100 years old, I was told
But when she arrived
The parties came alive
So, the customers thought she was gold

There once was a geiko from Hokkaido
There wasn’t anyone she didn’t know
You could be poor or be rich
She was never a bitch
And would always wave and say hello

There once was geiko thought to be crazy
But writing her off would be lazy
Because when she drank with the men
Being drunk, she would pretend
Good enough to be hired by Scorsese

There once was a geiko, so pretty
Not just good looks but also quite witty
She told lots of great jokes
Much funnier than the blokes
So, they voted her mayor of the city

There once was a geiko so tall
When she walked, we were all scared she’d fall
One night after beers
She fell down the stairs
And of her dancing career, that was all.

There once was a maiko so shy
When she saw men, she would cry
The house mother got madder
And she got even sadder
So, she left without saying goodbye

There once was a geiko who smoked
She smoked so much she would choke
When others told her to quit
She’d have quite a fit
And one day, she suddenly croaked

The once was a geisha not so pretty
Her face was tad bit zitty
And without her white face
She’d scare the whole place
So, she moved to a faraway city

*********************

Geisha expert Peter MacIntosh runs tours and organises special occasions. See his website Kyoto Sights and Nights and Facebook page. To watch his documentary Real Geisha Real Women, click here. For a short story see here, and for a short short see here. His PR page can be accessed here.

spider walks the air
unspooling from his being
lifelines of silver

where the wind takes it
how light a life that’s floating
shadow on the sand

Santoka* walking –
nothing between him and death
haiku and sake

gift of his whole life
Santoka into the wind 
ragged spirit free

reeds flailed by the wind                         
cry of the crow through torn cloud
sun smashed on the waves 
                     
crows hang the branches 
with cacophony of sound
raggedly flapping

now and then a bird
sends out its notes across the sky
carol to no one

bird song floats into                      
the mists of meditation                                     
perches in the mind                                         

blessing of the lake –                       
ducks given all this mirror
to float nothing on

ripples at the shore
pebbles underwater 
clarity surreal

autumn still as glass
all the silence of the sky
all the lakelong blue

it’s all so clear now!
dust of a thousand days
wiped from the I-phone

lake instrumental –                                    
sun sparkles random notes       
jazzing the surface

yellow butterfly                                                        
leaves off writing its sky dance
to settle, a leaf

trail of ivy leaves
scarlet in the autumn sun
necklace for the rocks

the wind passing through
nowhere no one no body only
where it goes

the cat stops mid-scratch 
leg still raised eyes caught
by the air’s movement

the cat unmoving
eyes slowly closing feeling all 
that there is there

at the end of day                                           
slowly flapping from the reeds                                                     
herohero** heron                                                                            

hardly a ripple
the lake gunmetal grey
duck glides the silence

rain gentles the mind
giving it a space of grey
letting the thoughts drop

the rain relentless  
a liquid blind of sound
drowning vision

wings soaked in sunlight                                           
dragonflies under silver cloud
zipping the day up

the waves loquacious                          
liquid song unending 
search  for melody

Notes

*Santoka Taneda (1882 -1940). Free-form haiku poet, inveterate drinker, and lover of the open road, he walked the length and breadth of Honshu, Kyushu and Shikoku, an estimated distance of about 45,000 kilometres.

**herohero (Jap.): ‘completely exhausted’, ‘thoroughly worn out’.

********************

For previous contributions by James Woodham, please see the striking poems and stunning photography here.  Or here. Or here. Or here. For his most recent postings, see A Single Thread here, or The Wind’s Word here, and for Vagabond Song click here.

Sea of Clouds (the art of change)

The November sun
Dazzles our faces with eyes closed
The bright glow of coloured leaves
Is not of this world
Here, today
It is another universe
That looks like the world
As it is
Of islands, rivers, mountains, oceans
A monochrome universe
Emerges from the stone
Expanding my mind
Falling on the moss
Like shooting stars
The maple leaves
Swept by the autumn wind
Or by the gardener
In the twilight
From the path of Yoshida Hill
I walk along the candlelight on the ground
A black butterfly
As big as my hand
Escapes from the darkness of the undergrowth
- Or is it a bat?
A tiny tea house
Above the bamboo grove of Kodai-ji temple
Under the full autumn moon
That illuminates the scarlet maples
And the cold of a night
Full of promise
Drop after drop
The basin of water fills
With the inebriation of life
Under the amazed gaze
Of a wise man silent
Like the passing of time
Small granite monk's heads
In a sea of green moss
Smile at life
As well as to death
Autumn rings hollow
Under the crackling sound
Of leaves tinged
With the past
I watch my thoughts
Reflected in the clear water
Of the lotus pool
Then floating
Like a sea of clouds
In a distant sky.

Manabeshima

Under the clouds diving into water
The absence of a new beginning
In the middle of this inland sea
Calm as a shoreless lake
I consider the possibility of an island
Swaying in the wind
- A solitary jellyfish!

Kiyotaki or the valley of bliss

The number eight bus abandons me at the curve
Stone stairs going down
Stone stairs going up
The face of the Buddha is invisible
In this mountain temple
The Japanese maples smile
Behind their faces scorched by the sun
And the coolness of the mountain nights
Stairs again and again
The sound of a Japanese lute
Makes the humid air vibrate on the river
I follow the path that follows the water
Climbing over blunt rocks
And suddenly the sight of a vermilion bridge
Amidst the vermilion maples
A man is fishing with a line
Sitting on the granite pebbles
As in an old print by master Hiroshige
- The hanging bridge of dreams.

*************************

These poems have been translated from French by the author. The book Rêves d’un mangeur de kakis is available from the publisher (www.michikusapublishing.com) or directly from the author.

For other writing by Robert Weis, see Mind Games in Arashiyama, or 71 Lessons on Eternity. For more on his travels, see his account of a walk from Ohara to Kurama here, or his spiritual journey to Kyoto here. His account of Nicolas Bouvier in Kyoto in the mid-1950s can be read here.

******************************************

Preston Keido Hauser is a longtime member of Writers in Kyoto, a poet and a player and teacher of the Japanese wind instrument shakuhachi. He has been in Kyoto since 1981. His website may be found at www.keidokyoto.wordpress.com. To read more of his work on the WIK website, click here.

Diary of a Rickshaw Puller

At Togetsukyo Bridge
awaiting customers
faces reflected in water

School excursion —
blue, white, and freshly laundered
a carnival passes me by

Lovingly polished
wheels of chrome, lacquer wood
who’ll ever know?

Sipping hot coffee
quickly —
a customer!

Her slender feet
white rabbits beneath
a peach kimono

Sunlight on her nape
my breath quickens
as I join the morning traffic

On a forest path
her sigh — or mine?
scent of bamboo

At Nonomiya Shrine —
care to make a wish
for love?

Nearing Jojakkoji Temple
a bush warbler sings
she speaks of a husband

Mountain breeze —
tailwind to Takiguchidera
her husband in Tokyo!

Uphill to Nisonin Temple
dew on hydrangeas
sweat beads my brow

Matcha ice cream —
her glistening lips
beneath a kiosk parasol

Passing Rakushida
ghost of Basho smiles
life is poetry!

At Seiryoji Temple
a lotus pond
from mud a flower blooms

Crossing railway lines
gently —
so as not to startle her

Towards Togetsukyo Bridge
my heart
a pounding drum

Alighting riverside
her hand in mine
coolness of silk

A school excursion —
her smiling face lost
in a river of blue

In my hand
folding faces of Fukuzawa
a phone number inside!

I reflected afterward that poetry is a medium that is better spoken than simply read, for it is in performance that verse really comes alive.   Test this theory for yourself, as we will return to Kyoto’s Bond’s Rosary on July 1st.  A Tokyo event will hopefully follow later in the year.  

Below are the haiku I read at that December event.  The Kenneth Rexroth essay was edited together from a few sources.  The haiku were split into two sets, Autumn and Winter.  

REXROTH INTRO:

“What is jazz poetry? It isn’t anything very complicated to understand. It is the reciting of suitable poetry with the music of a jazz band, usually small and comparatively quiet. Most emphatically, it is not recitation with “background” music. The voice is integrally wedded to the music and, although it does not sing notes, is treated as another instrument, with its own solos and ensemble passages.  […] It comes and goes, following the logic of the presentation, just like a saxophone or piano… 

…Poetry and jazz gain new and different dimensions in association. Poetry has always gained by association with music . . . ancient China, Japan, India, Greece, the troubadours and minnesingers and scalds. […] Jazz poetry reading puts poetry back in the entertainment business, where it was with Homer and the troubadours. […] Poetry gains from jazz an audience of widely diversified character, people who are seriously concerned with music, but who do not ordinarily read verse and who care nothing for the conflicts and rituals of the literary scene. […] Jazz poetry gets poetry out of the classrooms and into contact with large audiences who have not read any verse since grammar school.

…[Here] the voice [becomes] another instrument in the band.  […] The reciting, rather than singing voice, if properly managed, swings more than an awful lot of vocalists.  With a poet who understands what is going on, they are not at the mercy of a vocalist who wants just to vocalize and who looks on the band as a necessary evil at best.  [The] emotional complexity of good poetry provides the musician with continuous creative stimulus, but at the same time gives him the widest possible creative freedom… 

… This poetry and jazz combination is harder work than either of the arts taken separately. 

 Jazz poetry is an exacting, cooperative, precision effort, like mountaineering. Everybody has to be perfectly coordinated; […] everybody has to be as socialized as six men on a rope working across the face of a cliff…

…[Thus] the combination of jazz and poetry requires good poetry, competent recitation, everybody in the group really digging what everybody else is doing, and, of course, real tasty music. Then it’s great, and everybody loves it, ‘specially you, baby.”

AUTUMN:

1.
Shinadani’s Treasures
Lay scattered on the ground
Crimson and gold.


2.
Yellow leaves
Shown no regard
By men in grey suits.


3.
All that ripens
Must eventually fall.
Deepening autumn.


4.
Under a stone Buddhas sixth century gaze,
The temple’s lunch bell
Rings from a microwave.


5.
Trees speak of autumn.
But winter too has a voice,
Whispered on a slate grey sea.


6.
Under autumn’s perfection,
My feet follow the ancient road,
Bound-up in concrete.


7.
Gray obscures the edges,
As winter bides her time.
Days away, days away...

WINTER:

8.
Double-helix of steam
Rises from my coffee,
DNA of the day ahead.


9.
Across a gentle canvas of
A soft winter sunset,
I spilled my ink.


10.
Nothing growing  
In winter paddies 
But the shadows of running boys



11.
Sitting in the mountains,
Giving my life away
With every exhale.


12.
Wild grasses
Grow from cold moss
On Iwabune’s stone lantern.



13.
No rain,
But the clouds are daring you
To make plans.


14.
Flickering warmth
Helps stave off up to
12 centuries of cold.


15.
Old man in white mask
Covers his mouth
When he coughs.


16.
Resolution found,
The bickering weather gods
Settle on snow.


17.
In old Kyoto,
What is the 'kigo'
For tourist season?



18.
Young cut cedars,
Thick as my leg,
To be used in the New Years celebrations.



19.
Of a year on the wane,
Traces washed away by
Sake and rain.


20.
Counting syllables
Will certainly cause you to
Leave a haiku un...

A complete list of results for the Seventh Annual Kyoto Writing Competition can be found here.

＊　　　＊　　　＊

kintsugi

while we slept
we ran into cracks
our white bodies dressed alone
in down hair and clean bed sheets

white paint was peeling off the wall
above our bed
my skin wrinkled

your fingers followed the grooves
they tried to grope for what
there was still alive

in Kyoto someone taught me
how to seal cracks
paste shards with gold
never invisible
rather flashy
so that the fractions can be counted

and we learn to appreciate
that our defencelessness
makes us fragile

WORDS

For Yuri, 1983

The universal love-poem
has no words

By the window
a deep and full cup drinks:
technicolor red and yellow tulip
turning to the light

Living clay
on the sun's wheel

SHAKKEI, AT ENTSU-JI

The garden is empty; an airy room without walls.

The view across the valley to Hiei-zan is invited in
like a friend, to share a deep bowl of green tea—
this leisurely moss ocean lapping the cliff-stones
and azalea-islands,
cupped by a clipped camellia hedge
and breeze-stirred maples.

Viewed from Entsu-ji’s fresh tatami
veranda posts match spaced cryptomerias
dividing the garden vista like a folding screen.

A living painting of Nirvana, or Amitabha’s Pure Land?
No. Simply the natural world, experienced as shakkei—
borrowed landscape.

Borrowed mountain slopes traversed by borrowed light
and shadow; borrowed clouds traversing borrowed sky.
Birds traverse the view, lending their voices; a crow
echoes the staccato beat of a carpenter’s hammer.

Each present moment is loaned, just for the time being.
We borrow time like air, like sun, like water;
and everything is revealed as changing—refreshed,
regenerated, millisecond by millisecond.

The Buddha’s world of constant transience.
Worth framing. Priceless.

PRUNING A PINE TREE

My fine sophistry linking gardening and editing, particularly the metaphor of pruning, does not persuade the pine tree by our front door, overlooking the rice field. It submits—with clear reservations—to stripping out the clustered dry needles that thicket its upper reaches, but draws the line at arbitrary deletions. Right—who am I to unilaterally decide the shape of a mature pine?

Yuri meanwhile insists on closely trimming my straggly graying mustache and beard.
Being Japanese, she’s embarrassed that I look like I don’t care how others see me.
Being Australian, of course, I’m embarrassed to look like I care at all about my appearance.

My dapperly refined new look, as I ascend the ladder and haul myself into its topmost branches, certainly doesn’t impress the pine, which makes no secret of aspiring to absolute dragonhood.

SPRING 2011, ARASHIYAMA

Capture this
—self-regenerating brocade
Nihonga-delicate fresh bud, leaf, petal,
cascading over Mt Ogura's shoulder
perfuming farmer Zen's breeze…
—in a single haiku?
No way.

Cue the uguisu.

“Hō-hoke-kyo”

OK, got it.

Just one line
and the silence, before and after.

[Uguisu: bush warbler, “spring-announcing bird” or “sutra-reading bird”—said to quote the Lotus Sutra,saying“Hō-hoke-kyo”;Zen,a farmer-poet friend of haikuist Stephen Gill, is or was caretaker of the big field next to Rakushisha, the hut of fallen persimmons, Bashō’s temporary abode]

MAPLE-VIEWING AT KOETSUJI, NOV. 2021

If I were a poet, perhaps
I’d be a cosmologist of the heart;
maker of maps mountain-silhouetted
along all four sides, a conjurer of odes
imbued with autumn’s breathlessness,
the small-talk of endless streams,
birdcalls embroidered into maple brocade.

But what can I say? Each new day
is a different season.

Beyond this sudden blood-red overkill
of dazzling impermanence
cool afternoon sky
whispers one word:

infinity.

A complete list of results for the Seventh Annual Kyoto Writing Competition can be found here.

＊　　　＊　　　＊

Emperor Uda’s Love of a Cat

“Prince Uda, my cat is now yours,” the Emperor said.
“But father, why?” I asked. “Such a beautiful creature, black as ink!”
“You will know, soon enough,” he said.
I had no desire to rule over anybody. I had trained to be a monk, serene, silent, like a cat.
When I saw my father depart in the Phoenix Carriage, I understood his words, for without my cat I would have come unstuck.
My cat’s eyes are like sparkling needles.
When he crouches he is like a dark jewel. When he curls up he is tiny as an ear of black millet. His ears point sharply to the heavens. His height triples arching like a bow.
In motion he is soundless like a black dragon dancing above the clouds.
He knows yin and yang. By following The Tao he keeps his coat satiny.
That he is black as night is his advantage.
That he is a mouser peerless in Miyako is not surprising.
I give him milk porridge every breakfast like the Buddha ate after fasting.
I ask him questions and he answers honestly, wisely, carefully, silently.
I said to him, “You can see through me. I have no secrets from you. You know me better than I know myself.”
The black cat raised his head from his paws and stared at me, eyes piercing.
Then he sighed as if moved by my confession.
As though words were not enough to express his heart’s emotion.
His reply was more than eloquent.

This, I write in my diary in the first year of Kampyo (889), Heian-kyō.

Isobar Press, Tokyo, 2022.

A review by Mark Richardson.

I’m most at home with verse conventional to English from the 16th through the 20th centuries. I enjoy poems that argue or imply arguments. I want rhyme, well-framed stanzas, conceits. Give me Hardy, Herbert, Larkin, Frost or Bishop⎯or Seidel and Ogden Nash. Still, I’ve read haiku in English, and haiku-like poetry in English⎯a fair amount of it. I never acquired a taste for most Black Mountain School versions of haiku-like poetry, or for its Pound or Charles Olson incarnations. Robert Creeley, Snyder, and William Carlos Williams published a lot of haiku-like poetry, and much of theirs I enjoy. But I’ve never written about this kind of poetry, not a paragraph that I can recall. In that sense I’m new to the game. So, I’ll speak of its rules and conventions⎯givens that most readers of Wintermoon would feel no need to speak of. I’ll ask questions and cover ground not strictly necessary to a book review.

For example, there’s an elliptical grammar peculiar to haiku written in English. Wintermoon employs it. Consider this poem, the first in part five of the book, “Back Route on Fushimi Inari”:

main path
that way
go this way (37)

I assume two sentences are implied here, one indicative, the other imperative: “The main path is that way. Go this way instead”⎯this way being (again my assumption) the “back route” of the subtitle. Get off the beaten path. Leave the flock. Alright, sensei⎯I’ll try. (I think I know that un-beaten path, having once gotten lost, with no cell-phone reception, somewhere inside Fushimi Inari.) Now: exactly how does the poetry get into this haiku? Is it first by compression⎯the omission of an article, the copula, and an adverb⎯and then by lineation? I don’t doubt that the poetry gets in. Wintermoon is a lovely book, though “main path”⎯–I’ll refer to the poems by their first line⎯is not a high point. The sentiment, here, is unsurprising, and paradox always arises when you find yourself instructed to leave the beaten path (unless the imperative is self-directed). Of course, it’s unreasonable to single out, from a carefully ordered collection of them, so short a haiku-like poem.

Whatever the case, the elisions and line breaks seem: (a) meant to slow the poem down (requisite in a text of seven words), and probably meant also to suggest how it ought to be said aloud (with two little pauses and a beat at the end); (b) meant to reflect, in English, the fact that pronouns generally don’t populate haiku in Japanese, and the fact that Japanese sentences usually imply a subject, and so can strike a native speaker of English as merely predicative; (c) meant to reflect the fact that Japanese doesn’t have articles (hence one major difficulty Japanese learners of English encounter); and (d) meant to reproduce the two-to-three line arrays in which haiku in Japanese are presented (though these lines are often vertical in Japanese). These practices are evident in a great deal of haiku, and haiku-like poetry, in English. One thing more: “main path,” like most haiku, isn’t written for the speaking voice. Who talks this way? Nobody. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it aloud. But if you do, you must adopt the “voice” of English haiku, and that voice is distinctive proportionate to the distinctiveness of English-haiku grammar.

Another example, from late in the book:

Kyoto silent now no traffic
temple bell rings 108 sins
backward to zero (65)

Again, two sentences are implied: “Kyoto is silent now, with no traffic [in its streets]. A/The temple bell rings 108 sins backward to zero.” Maclean provides a helpful note, for readers unacquainted with this Buddhist ritual: “On Oshogatsu, New Year’s Eve, throughout Japan, temple bells are struck 108 times, voicing the ‘snares and delusions’ (bonno) of tradition. No one today seems quite sure what these 108 sins are, but it’s fun trying to find out” (83). In short, the poem captures an annual event, which happens immediately before midnight, with the city traffic all thinned out; the poem also captures the idea that this is a count-down, not a counting up, of the 108 sins (you start at 108, not at 1). The ringing of the bell is thought to help rid us, as if by sympathetic magic, of the sins of the dying year. “Zero” is the aim. In line two, at first blush, “rings” transiently seems intransitive (a temple bell rings). But of course, we see at once that it’s transitive, though in an unusual way, owing to the object it takes and the adverb that modifies it: the bell rings the sins backward. As with “main path,” I can’t quite say how the poetry gets into “Kyoto silent” by omission of articles, a copular verb, and so on. But again, I don’t doubt that poetry gets in, and the tongue-clapper in its bell (the verb “rings”) is the more eloquent for the unusual grammar.

Here’s a poem where elisions don’t quite work, I think, or at any rate become inadvertently salient.

stopping on Kitaoji bridge
look down
my drowned face

Line one, a participial phrase, doesn’t readily give in to line two, which, though presumably short for “I look down,” doesn’t banish⎯I mean altogether banish⎯the ghost of an imperative mood. Is “look down” a request to a companion on that bridge? I doubt it. The unstated “I” must be alone with his “my.” But I can’t be certain. How often do statements made in haiku imply an addressee other than the reader? Very seldom, I think. (See “hold hand-,” below, for a possible exception.) I also wonder if the omission of subjects and pronouns leads composers of English haiku to deal in quasi-imperatives⎯or in brief sentences that are ambiguously imperative⎯when they don’t really wish to. I’m not sure the past tense in line three sounds right. The larger sentence implied must be something like: “Stopping on Kitaoji bridge, I look down and find my face (its refection), drowning in the water.” Perhaps I’m sensing, or fabricating, a temporal problem, somehow springing from the fact that the three verbs are conjugated to different purposes: stopping, I look down, and my face has already drowned. Do its eyes give back no gaze? Does the serene composure of the reflected face immediately seem lifeless? Or is the tone of the poem dark, as if the watcher on the bridge somehow feels implicated in what he says and sees of his face? One might well hear the tone as whimsical: a face, not a person, drowns, of course (no jumpers here). The slight oscillation between moods⎯indicative, imperative⎯may be deliberate. I’m aware, of course, that English haiku aren’t equivalent to any grammatically complete sentences they may imply. Still, this poem asks a bit too much of English syntax and grammar. Its joints creak. Wintermoon is otherwise entirely free of ellipticalities that trip me up. One can see that a composer of haiku in English will always have a hard time telling how far to carry his language towards Japanese. Maclean almost always gets it right.

One more technical matter. Occasionally, though sparingly, Maclean splits words at line ends, giving us a poem that can be experienced only on the page, in type, as he does in this haiku:

lum
inous empti
ness (71)

The poet dispenses with hyphens (in one or two other instances of this kind he employs them), so we have, here, the effect at its most conspicuous. I do not think Japanese haiku provide a precedent for this. The technique must derive from such poets as ee cummings and perhaps some of the Black Mountain crew. Herbert, though, does similar things a couple of times in The Temple (1633). Marianne Moore splits a few words. Ben Jonson breaks a word up at least once⎯in “To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison” (lines 92-93: “twi- / Lights”).

But what can be the use of this technique in “lum”? I’ll take a flier and guess that we are to hear these lines in two ways: “loom in us, emptiness” (ad homonym, so to speak) and “luminous emptiness” (straight up). The second reading is indicative (it specifies that emptiness and illumination are related); the first is invocative (“Emptiness, loom in us”). Fair play? Why not, once in a while? Construed this way, the poem winks a little: its two incarnations reflect (or reflect on) each other. Maclean, as I say, has the tact to use this technique very sparingly. You can see its necessity here. The plain phrase “luminous emptiness” would make no poem, say nothing novel, involve no play, nor give anyone reason to utter it in a special way. Best to cut up with it in type. I should add that, read with the two haiku it follows, “lum” takes on a far stranger and more solemn aspect. Many of the haiku in this book are subtly, and artfully, altered by the ones that precede or follow them.

One other example from the broken-word school:

hold hand-
lessness
on your lap (63)

Why is the hyphen employed here and not in “lum”? I assume because “handlessness” is a nonce word and therefore needs the help; you also must know that the second line isn’t altogether to be treated as a word. This haiku is a sentence, imperative mood. It’s pedagogical, as are several others, and has to do, I gather, with Zen practice. Part one of the book is titled “Zazen at Tofukuji” and this poem is addressed (second person) to someone sitting. Is “hold hand-” that rarity I spoke of above⎯a haiku with an implied, on-the-scene-auditor, additional to the reader? Is it half of an exchange? I doubt it (unless Maclean is the addressee). Anyway, Maclean needs a word for a non-idea that lacks one, and he finds it, or a hint of it, in “lessness,” where the suffix -ness makes a noun of less, as it makes a noun of the adjective “empty.” Intensify lessness enough and you arrive at emptiness. But take the word whole, no line-break: handlessness. What can this mean? The state of being handless? And what then are we being told to hold? Something that we can’t lay hands on or should keep hands off. This is holding of another kind, as when we hold a thought, or an unthought⎯the thought of “handlessness,” for example. Hard work. But then “hold hand-” appears in part eight of the book, “Rohatsu Sesshin at Tofukuji.” A welcome note in the appendix explains: “A sesshin is an intensive training retreat, usually for seven days; literally, ‘to gather the mind.’ The Rohatsu sesshin is held in December to commemorate the Buddha’s enlightenment and is noted for its severity” (my emphasis; 82). This accounts both for the imperative in “hold hand-” and for what that imperative asks of us. Can you handle it?

Wintermoon consists of 119 haiku. By my count 53 of these either are or contain proper English sentences (about half), ranging from the indicative to the interrogative to the imperative mood. Maclean is at ease in or out of proper English sentences (except, perhaps, when he’s on that bridge at Kitaoji). And he’s appealingly unsystematic in setting his haiku up (as Robert Bringhurst notes in the jacket copy). Maclean is no 5-7-5 poet, as what I’ve quoted shows.

The poems are by turns observational, riddling, seasonal, instructional, humorous, and enigmatic. A reader gathers from one haiku that the poet hails from a much colder clime than Kyoto (a biographical note on the back of the book tells us where: Cape Breton, Nova Scotia).

wind bell
icicles
my distant country (34)

This poem appears in part four of the book, “Summer Solstice.” The metaphor rings as lovely as it does plain: wind chimes, touched by a summer breeze here in Kyoto, remind the poet of icicles⎯and with that thought comes a wave of nostalgia (for a maritime province in Canada, or anyway somewhere cold and a long-haul flight away). Wind chimes are like icicles in that both typically hang from the eaves. Wind chimes are also metallic and often cool/cold to the touch, and, like ice, they glint in the sun. For their part, icicles are like chimes in that the wind can play clacking tricks with them. (I know from my decade in Michigan.) The metaphor comes over us quickly, as it must have overcome the poet, and precisely in the steps implied by the lineation: one, two, three. The poem⎯caught in the act of having its idea⎯summons winter in summer, ice in the heat, with a paradoxical grace (homesickness involves its own relief). One question remains: why the singular bell, and the plural icicles? We may not be speaking of “wind chimes,” in which case some of what I’ve said may not apply. The poet has been a bit more precise than me: he likely means fuurin (風鈴).

As for observational haiku, here is a good example, from part three of the book, “Three Mat Room” (for readers unfamiliar with Japanese domiciles, that means a very small room: about fifty square feet):

5 a.m.
old ladies gossiping
by blue garbage bags (23)

No figurative work at all, here. Instead, the interest comes in the setting implied, which must be urban. This is the sort of thing you can only hear, from inside your bedroom (it’s 5 AM), when living in close quarters⎯and when living in cities, we infer, with ordinances that proscribe leaving garbage bags out overnight, and which govern recycling (the bags are the same color for a reason). Also implied is enough competence in Japanese to know “gossip” from some other kind of talk; we are learning a lot from a little about the poet. Another thing we learn is that he knows when not to omit an article or a preposition. Remove “by” from that last line and see what happens.

A haiku on the page following “5 a.m.” confirms that these are city poems. This one offers a bit of “how to” advice.

how to navigate
crowds
deadman’s float (24)

Maclean doubtless speaks from experience, hard-won in, say, Shijo Station during Gion Matsuri. Christ, those crowds. You can lift both feet off the floor in them. This haiku is witty⎯and, as I’ll suggest in a moment, perhaps something more into the bargain. (Maclean’s best haiku are expansive condensations.) The wit has to do with the fact that “navigation” cannot be a passive act, a letting go. “Navigation” implies control and a destination, whereas in “how to” we are advised to treat the crowd as an ocean or river, as a thing with currents in it, and advised then to let ourselves float on those currents. But not float in just any way: we are to dead–man float, exertion-less. Is there a slight imprecision here? If you dead-man floated in a crowd, you’d somehow have to get atop it⎯though remaining facedown (this isn’t crowd surfing). Whatever the case, “how to navigate” says, in a whimsical-humorous way, what we’re elsewhere, many times, told to do in Wintermoon: relinquish or abolish “self” (an aim, as I understand it, of Zen and zazen). Compare “how to navigate” to this haiku, from part one, “Zazen at Tofukuji”:

fall inside yourself
until that word too
is gone (13)

Another sort of dead-man’s float: a fall is passive, non-exertive, a letting go–anything but a jump. And the idea is to fall so far that the word you once used to refer to yourself follows you right down the self-hole like a Kennebunkport windbreaker no one will ever again need. Yes, let go of the thing; let go even of the word for the thing. Unscrew the doors of perception from their jambs. But to return for a moment to “how to navigate.” Surely I won’t be the only reader familiar with the navigation of crowds in Japan to point out that there’s another technique than the dead-man’s float: the extension of the right hand in a chopping, blade-like maneuver, tipping your head and quickstepping in the direction it indicates. This always parts the waters. Some unspoken social contract concerning the use of this gesture must exist. If I’ve seen it deployed once (and to astonishing effect), I’ve seen it deployed a hundred times. The gesture is unique to Japanese men, I should add. I don’t recall ever seeing a woman use The Blade. How they “navigate” our denser crowds I don’t know. I’ve used The Blade a few times myself. The glances I sometimes get suggest I’m committing an act of appropriation, as if The Blade can’t be used by just anyone. But all this only seconds the quasi-philosophical point made in “how to navigate.” Use of The Blade in a crowd is highly Self-Assertive, thoroughly directional, as aimed as is any arrow. And, no, we just can’t have any of that in Wintermoon. A dead-man float it must be.

I implied that we learn a good deal about the poet in Wintermoon. We learn not only that he is (or was) an expat from a cold climate practicing/studying Zen in Kyoto. We learn that he was a teacher. From “Three Mat Room”:

even though they seemed
to be listening
how quickly everyone leaves

You might take this as an observation about a crowd in a concert hall, but you’d be wrong. We are in a classroom. Who other than a teacher would feel the pathos in the aptitude with which students so deftly disembark? Everyone in the teaching racket wonders how real apparent listening is. Do we expat-native-sensei have a harder time gauging this than our Japanese colleagues? I haven’t asked. The other question implied in “even though they seemed” is harder to put and more humbling: “Was what I just said worth listening to?” Maclean follows this haiku, and its quiet air of doubt, with the only answer that can rightly be made:

erase the whiteboard
turn off the light
bow to the empty room

Did Maclean-sensei perform this last act? ¥10,000 says he did. Keep it all modest, leave the classroom cleaner than you found it, and never forget your due respects⎯without regard to whether anyone sees you pay them. And really, does it matter whether the students were listening, or matter what it was they supposed they’d heard? No classroom is a crucible. I like the attitude these poems take towards teaching.

This haiku, also from “Three Mat Room,” gives us a way to think about Maclean’s art.

my voice
a rusty knife
whittling these shavings

Call this an equation haiku, with the “is” or equal sign left out: “my voice [is] a rusty knife whittling these shavings.” “Voice” we take for poetic voice, the chiefly silent vocalizing you get into when making poems (and by which the poems are recognized as yours). Only here, writing is whittling, and the poems are the shavings the knife-voice reduces our lumber-language into. Whittling⎯at least in North America⎯is the very type of a pleasant but aimless endeavor. Whittle and slip outside of Time. Whittling was already a figure before Maclean got to it. (The Andy Griffith Show whittles.) Whittling can be purposeful, if what you want is a proverbial sharp stick in the eye (the thing all other things are said, in American English, to sure beat). But really, whittling is the place where aimlessness and craft have their encounter⎯in a kissing-cousin way. I think “my voice” suggests that Maclean finds the wellspring of his poems right there, where aimlessness somehow acquires purpose, or where purpose feels effortless. Is there Zen in this? You want, he seems to be saying, to have as little will in the act, which means as little Self-assertion in it, as is needed.

And yet, there’s a fully realized personality in Wintermoon: zazen-sitter, city-dweller, husband, father, cat lover, very likely a guitar player, an animist, mourner, expatriate, neighbor, teacher, philosopher (more in a minute), and disciple. You wouldn’t mistake his shavings for those made by any other knife. His voice is a “rusty” knife anyhow, oxidized, corroded a bit by life. Rust is a slow burn, but a burn nonetheless. This whittler’s voice⎯his instrument⎯is tarnished, roughed up, aged; this is part of its appeal. Does anyone ever clean a knife before whittling with it? The acts seem incompatible.

Wintermoon is, to be sure, a philosophical book. This is announced by haiku and section-titles that derive from or name Zen practices. Some haiku strike me as animistic, and of a more ancient vintage than Zen.

light pulses
in the ventricles
of a stone (33)

The elliptical grammar of English haiku raises a question. Is “light” an adjective or a noun? If the latter, this is a seen event and not a felt one (no nurse’s geo-sensitive fingers laid on here). “Light” as a noun would also make this haiku a sentence. But who’s to say this isn’t a felt event, that the poet didn’t touch the stone, and that this isn’t an eight-word phrase? The poem makes me suspect we’ve been slandering the mineral world all these years by giving unempathetic people “hearts of stone.” Maclean’s hearty stone has ventricles, and he’s tender about it. Is some litho-cardio-vascular worry implied? Sclerosis?⎯from the Greek “sklērós,” or “hard.” God forbid. Other stones in Wintermoon give⎯I don’t think they take⎯“language lessons” (39). Some may even converse with cats (51).

Two haiku concern insect emotion (including “love”). This one might have been written by a Jain:

cockroach scuttles
across the sidewalk
afraid (19)

The omission of the article at the head of the poem allows for a momentary experience of “cockroach” as adjectival and “scuttles” as a noun. What kind of “scuttles”? The cockroach kind. But the point is sympathetic: insects, too, know fear. Or better still, and closer to the language of the poem: cockroaches are often sore afraid. That adjective can involve a latent tenderness, or pathos, as the translators of the English Bible knew; “scared,” for example, lacks it. (“Scared” turns up once in the KJV; “afraid,” 232 times.) I almost wish Maclean had added the adverb sore, but the rules of the game forbid it.

This haiku sent me to Wikipedia and to PubMed.gov (one of the internet’s Incontestably Great Sites). Your cockroach, it seems, is not a “true bug” (i.e., not a member of the order Hemiptera). He/she/they are more ancient. Still, the cockroach is a social insect. In fact, Adrienn Uzsák and Coby Schal have shown that, in females of the species Blattella germanica (the German cockroach), “social isolation slows oocyte development, sexual maturation, and sexual receptivity.” Female Blattella need a little foreplay: the “tactile cues” that come from crossing antennae. So, we can speak of cockroach fear and of cockroach loneliness, and therefore obviously of cockroach happiness. Incidentally, the tone of the Wikipedia page for Blattella germanica suggests it was composed chiefly by entomologists in the pay of Big Pest Control. Uzsák and Schal (and Maclean) have considerably more fellow feeling.

This brings me to the haiku that concludes “A Walk by the Kamo River” (part two of Wintermoon).

creaturely world
translations
from a lost original

Does the plural in line two require that we regard each creature in our “creaturely world” as a translation of a “lost original”? Or is the creaturely world we now inhabit⎯taken tout court, cockroaches and all⎯the last in a long series of “translations” from an “original text” now “lost”? Both seem possible. (Incidentally, here is a case where omission of an article, or of the possessive pronoun “our,” at the start of the first line is necessary to the view implied.) This haiku may remind some readers that “translation” has a meaning in metempsychosis. Souls⎯ themselves immortal⎯are “translated” from body to body, but, after a dip in the waters of the river Lethe, they must, with each birth, forego memory: all previous “editions” of a soul are “lost” to it. The most celebrated statement of the idea comes at the conclusion of The Republic. We meet a modified version of it here. Now, imagine that first line as “animal world” or “this animal world.” That wouldn’t do, and not because it excludes the plant kingdom. “Creature” is to “animal” as “afraid” is to “scared” (see above): there is a pathos to “creature,” unavailable to “animal,” probably owing to how it holds within it the idea of creation. “All animals great and small, / The Lord God made them all” is awful⎯in sound and doctrine.

Maclean works with ready material. Jargon borrowed from writing now pervades talk of genetics, and therefore talk of biology: “editing,” “transcription,” “code,” “decoding,” “translation,” and of course DNA, “written” by us spellers in a four-letter alphabet: AGCT. In biology “translation”⎯so says my dictionary⎯is the conversion, during protein synthesis, of a sequence of nucleotides in “messenger” RNA into amino acids. (Messenger RNA: language again.) “Translation” is a function within “the language of life,” to borrow a phrase from Francis Collins⎯former head of the Human Genome Project (and member of the creaturely Pontifical Academy of Sciences). In what sense is our “creaturely world” a “translation” of a “lost original”? As a neo-Darwinian, I grant that every “creature” now living⎯and of course let’s bring the plant kingdom in⎯is a fresh phenotypical “utterance,” at times with slightly new “spelling” and a novel “idiom” or two, made in an underlying “language” (the genome). Some scientists quest after the Last Universal Common Ancestor of everything now alive (LUCA), which must have been a phenotypical “utterance” in the “ur-language of life.” They expect to find its first “speakers” in (say) prokaryotes or protoeukaryotes dating to the Archean Eon. The dinosaurs were “translated” into the Library of Birds, and so still may be “read” there, albeit in the Avian. Or think of birds as theropods “written” in “Cenozoic,” or “translated” from the “Cretacean” into the Cenozoic. (I may mistake my nomenclature.)

I assume the idea in “creaturely world” requires that we suppose the “translations” will continue. Obviously, at some point no creature will “speak” the AGCTs peculiar to the human genome. Whether its “language” will ever be “translated” is doubtful; we seem bent on ensuring it won’t, so jealous are we of legatees. The language called “cockroach,” by contrast, is proverbially immortal. Haiku are often said to catch “moments.” This one takes much less than a moment to utter. But its clock is set to geological time.

One more, this time from part seven of the book, “Autumn.”

crickets pulse all night
harmonic
of a deeper tuning (49)

Maclean hears the stridulating “pulses,” or chirping, of the crickets as if in hertz; they indicate a certain frequency beneath which (“deeper”) you can infer a more fundamental, or tonic, frequency, even if you can’t “hear” it. The metaphor is acoustic. A “harmonic,” in the sense used here, is a frequency some specifiable order of magnitude higher than that of a given tonic note (or “first harmonic”). Guitar players produce harmonics by lightly touching the A string, say, above the fifth fret and then plucking it. The tonic, or first “harmonic,” here is 110 hertz, the third, what you hear when you employ the technique, is 440 hertz (two octaves up, a note you can sound by plucking the high E string at the fifth fret). Lightly touch the A string at the seventh fret, while lightly touching the low E string (82.41 hertz) at the fifth, pluck both, and you get the same E note (329.64 hertz, now two octaves up). That’s one way to harmonize your guitar. And “crickets pulse all night” concerns harmony⎯obviously, the harmony of the natural world, which includes us. The Great Tonic Note of the whole affair may be “deeper” than any we can actually “hear.” But this haiku assumes, or simply posits, that the tuning of the world is nonetheless sound and well-tempered. The assumption entails the idea that the natural world involves, or maybe is, a kind of “music”; that everything in it is probably reading off the same score; and that, although our senses always afford us only a partial audition of this music, we can, given sufficient clarity of mind, discern that it is whole. This haiku presents itself as a record of exactly this kind of discernment and implies (again) a particular philosophical outlook. The world, for that matter the cosmos, is somehow consonant, agreeably ordered, and, so far as I can tell from this book, all’s pretty much right with it. Maclean’s is not a tragic view, at least not in Wintermoon. Nor is he a pessimist or a cynic.

Wintermoon, in “crickets pulse all night,” recalls Dryden, in his Lucretian “Song for St. Cecelia’s Day (1687):

From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
——-This universal frame began.
——-When Nature underneath a heap
————Of jarring atoms lay,
————And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
————“Arise ye more than dead.” …

From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
——This universal frame began:
 —–From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
—–The diapason closing full in man. (479)

Maclean doesn’t share that last sentiment. He’s no humanist in the old sense, as Dryden is. I think it safe to call Wintermoon a vote against any humanism that takes “mankind” as the starting point⎯or culmination⎯of inquiry. Mankind is the center of nothing, nor is it the fulfilment, resolution or “close” of anything (Dryden uses “close” in its musicological sense). And if ever we hear a dissonant note in all the “music” Maclean hearkens to, it will be⎯count on it⎯sounded in a man or a woman. Only our minds are unsound or unclean.

But the world, as we know it in Wintermoon, is right in tune. We don’t say who the Conductor of all this music is, let alone the Composer. I suspect the idea is that we inhabit an auto-composing and auto-conducting world (or cosmos), and it somehow “knows” how to “play” or “perform” itself. And the music is darn good, maybe even another Pet Sounds. The “cricket” haiku says something like what “creaturely world” says: stipulate that we can’t get at the “lost original” of which this creaturely world is a translation; stipulate also that we can’t really get at, by transcription, the score of whatever “music” the world “is” or “plays.” We can, however, deduce that the “original language” once existed, and that the “score” still exists and sounds out its first harmonic. And we can dig it. This book hints at the reality of the unseen⎯to borrow a phrase from William James⎯but also at the reality of the unheard.

Wintermoon, on any number of pages, suggests (or states) ideas of the kind found in “crickets pulse all night.” The book is of a piece. Its wholeness suggests a much “deeper” composure, which we might on occasion achieve, or anyway sense⎯with practice, lots of practice. At times, the book speaks of terrific bereavement, as, for example, in a haiku of three lines almost too much to bear in their plain-spoken way (see page 70; I will not quote the poem here; leave it to the privacy of its pages, which afford and reflect consolation). Bereavement is one thing a “creaturely” world must involve. But Wintermoon is equal to it. As I’ve hinted, this book is pitched in a major key, though not without its moods indigo (see the image on the cover: “Tsuki,” by Sarah Brayer). I take it as written by an exponent of something like the “religion of healthy-mindedness” William James describes in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). “One can but recognize in such writers … the presence of a temperament organically weighted on the side of cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of opposite temperament linger, over the darker aspects of the universe. … Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision” (83, 88). But no, that’s wrongheaded: Wintermoon “deliberately excludes” nothing from its field (except those pronouns and articles). If it exemplifies “healthy-mindedness,” it does so in a nuanced form⎯healthy-mindfulness, say. Does this book entail a variety of religious experience? Yes. And its constitution is of the “twice-born” kind, as James would say. Wintermoon derives from an experience of enlightenment or conversion, or something very like one. Healthy-mindfulness of the kind it implies acknowledges the wickedness of the creaturely world, but “places” or “sorts it out,” and attains thereby its resolution (as James says Buddhism can). And its attainment is the work of many a year, even if it sometimes arrives⎯I can only assume, sick soul that I am⎯as if in a wind-chimes-to-icicles-to-Canada instant.

Wintermoon is a tonic. I commend it to any reader. True, five days out of seven I turn to unregenerate poetry of the irrefragably mordant, once-born kind⎯and in rhyming stanzas or sonnets. Hardy’s poetry, as I said above. Or Frost’s. Or Larkin’s. (How does “This Be the Verse” relate to the desire to escape the Wheel of Existence?) The gracefulness these poets achieve is the more striking because they don’t imagine a world with any grace in it at all. Their world is a jangle. On occasion, they deliberately include evil in their “field of vision” of it. (See “Christmas: 1924,” by Hardy, or “Deceptions” by Larkin.) And the only “practice” these poets embrace is the practice of making poems. But that’s neither here nor there. Whatever gets you through the night is all right.

WORKS CITED

Dryden, John. “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687.” In Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. The Oxford Book of English Verse. New edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1940.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York and London: Longmans, Green, 1902.

Uzsák, Adrienn and Coby Schal. “Sensory Cues Involved in Social Facilitation of Reproduction in Blattella germanica Females.” PLoS ONE 8(2): e55678. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0055678.

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