October 16, 2020

El Maguey y Leon


My father has adopted a Mexican boy named Maguey; 

Eight years old, he speaks no English. 

Brown skin, black eyes, white smile—

We talk about his animal friends. Who are you? I ask.

Your friend many days, he replies. The cats all like him, and I.


Driving out along a country road 

I’ve driven many times before but 

The wheel goes rubbery in the rutted mud. 

Then a canyon, the road narrows, slopes down 

Through closing walls of rock I no longer know. 

Suddenly a creek, limestone shelves, pools of water. 

I can’t navigate the drop-offs and step out into knee-deep water.


I climb the canyon wall, behind me 

Maguey, sandy-haired and grown into a man 

Midwest style. I call him Mike. 

We climb up over green-mossed white granite 

Boulders until we come out at the castle.


The grillwork, a briarpatch of rusted spikes, 

and carved in the stone the bipartite shield still shows 

Castil y Léon, the moss undisturbed since 1600. 

Below, the Spanish coastal plain 

spreads out, further still the gray Atlantic. 

From the abandoned cemetery above the city, the ancient canons 

fire. 


We talk about death. There’s a defeat in Mike’s voice 

I don’t know, a new tone of weariness and hurt. 

Yet he strides ahead of me over the rocks, 

and I follow, heading down toward the plain. 

He has been this way since Leon died.

October 15, 2020

"Van Gogh and the Fortunes of Art" by Ueno Wayne

When the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert visited Arles in Provence in 1958
He meets an old man at the Cafe de l’Alcazar who remembers Van Gogh
and Herbert draws him out with American cigarettes and wine. 
The old man opens the dialogue.


“You are interested in Van Gogh?”

“Very much.”

“Why?”

“He was a great painter.”

“So they say. I ain’t seen nary a one of his pictures.”


His bony fingers tap his empty glass. Herbert fills it.


“Well then. Van Gogh. He’s dead.”

“But you knew him?”

“Nobody knew him. He lived alone, like a dog. People were sceared of him.”

“Why?”

“He ran around the fields with them huge canvases. Boys'd throw stones at him. I didn’t. I was too small. Three or four.

“So you didn’t like him?”

“He was very funny. His hair was the color of a carrot.”


The old man laughs long, heartily, and with evident satisfaction.


“He was a very funny man. Il était drôle. His hair was like a carrot. I remember it well. You could see it from a distance.”


The cafe’s patron didn’t know Van Gogh but he remembered a family story told by his mother. One afternoon this crazy painter rushed into their vineyard shouting for them to buy a painting. They just managed to shove him outside the gate. “He wanted only fifty francs,” the patron concluded with a deep melancholy.


During his stay in Arles and nearby St Rémy, Van Gogh completed hundreds of paintings and drawings. Not one remains in the city whose citizens petitioned the authorities to place the madman in an asylum. The petition was published in the local newspaper and may be seen in the Arles Museum. The grandsons could easily excuse their grandfathers’ cruelty, but not the melancholy fact that they let a fortune slip through their fingers.


[Author's note: This story must derive from Herbert, but I no longer remember where or when I read it.]

May 18, 2020

Tokimori, the Time Keeper’s Daughter

It was March 28th, 2009 and I was down for the JALT convention
They had her in the radiation ward of a large ramshackle hospital 
in Hiroshima for second-generation bomb victims
the bomb having been not just nuclear warfare but biological
She had plastic curtains so we wouldn’t breath on her
her immune system was shot all to hell
but she opened the curtains for Rube and me
We’d bought a six-pack of beer and carried it in
drank the beer and lined the cans up one by one on the window sill
“How’s it gonna hurt anything?” he asked me. “They already been bombed.”

Katsuko’s grand-mom had been a strong-minded woman
took three lovers and left each for as good a reason as she took him
she ground pharmaceuticals with a mortar and pestle
for her husband the village doctor
He’d built the Yoshijima house where Katsuko grew up
bringing the timber down from the mountains to build it strong
It’s a country house, the only one of its kind left in Hiroshima
Recent additions like the modern toilet outside were afterclaps
the old folks couldn’t accept the idea of a toilet indoors
The family name was Tokimori, Edo Era time keepers.

K was born August 9, three days after the blast.Her mother turned her back to it 
and fell, doubling her body to protect the child in her womb
Three days later, unaided, her back a mass of burn tissue, she gave birth.
The child grew up skin-to-skin with  her mother, the keloid scars just mother flesh  
K swam in the clear stream of the Motoyasu River
gathered shellfish in a bucket she took home to her mother
who put them in saltwater overnight so they’d open and expel the sand
then she’d use them in misoshiru. Each time K gave birth 
the’d slit the lower labia to give the child room for the womb to expel it
then sewed it back up. When the babies had bad colds 
she'd sucked the snot from their noses so they could breathe.  

Sex with hubby stopped eight years ago, with her youngest’s birth. 
She'd wanted cunnilingus and he acted insulted.  
Time went by till they screwed again and still he wouldn't kiss her there, 
At last K asked him, "mada?" That was it, the end of marital sex
A few years later she began an affair with a local socialist politician
She worked for his campaigns and slept with him once a month.  
Her breasts had lost their peachiness, but he told her she was his favorite 40-year-old. 
She liked him but not the competition with all his younger women
so she withdrew for as good a reason as she’d begun. That was three years ago.

She still sleeps with her daughter, she told me.
They sleep side by side, holding hands or just touching.  
Kana cuddles Chappi when she goes to sleep
but during the night she tosses him aside  
He's dark and worn, has no eyes or features just a black bearish shape
Kana, watching her cut her hair, had asked, "Mama, do you have a broken heart?"  
"No," she'd replied, "but at my age it wouldn't be odd. Why do you ask such things?"
Kana is ten years old.  Growing up, says her mother. 
She’s noticed that the odor (おりもの) in Kana's pants is the same as hers.  
That shows the strength of heredity, she said
giving me a glimpse into the world of mother-daughter-ness.

Today K’s head is shaven like a nun’s and she wears a knit skull cap
She has her Buddhist sutras beside her at last
A few years ago she told me, “being healthy I don’t think about religion. 
When I get sick and am facing death, then I’ll study the sutras.”
She didn’t need sutras. Smiling in death’s bad breath
as a time being she was already enlightened
she just didn’t know it. Now she was out of it.

April 3, 2020

No Mountain / Hanshan / 寒山 in Ueno Park

Below is the introduction to my book of poems called No Mountain: Improvisations from Han-Shan’s New Home in Ueno Park, Tokyo. Inspired by Cold Mountain/ Hanshan. Now available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B086Y2YXMT/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tpbk_p1_i0
.



The island of Shotenjima


He Spoke and I Wrote

Like most poetry lovers who are also readers of English, I first came across the Tang Dynasty poet Cold Mountain in the pages of Gary Snyder, but Snyder is a strong poet, so once I had conceived my own project I put him aside and have not looked at him since. I even stopped using the name Cold Mountain and in my mind he lived under his Chinese name, Hanshan. Because I live in Japan, I also called him Kanzan. He is especially loved by the Japanese, who know him under that name. Both of these names are readings of the characters 寒山.
Instead of Snyder, I might have first picked up Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, published in 1958 but probably written soon after 1955, the year the novel recounts. It was also the year that Snyder began his translation. The legendary Chinese poet was a sympathetic figure for the Beat Generation. In the introduction to his translation which appeared in the Evergreen Review, Snyder wrote of Hanshan, "He and his sidekick Shih-te (Jittoku in Japanese) became great favorites with Zen painters of later days — the scroll, the broom, the wild hair and laughter. They became Immortals and you sometimes run into them today in the skidrows, orchards, hobo jungles, and logging camps of America." Kerouac's The Dharma Bums closes with a vision of Hanshan, and at Snyder's suggestion, Kerouac dedicated the book to the poet.
It is the image of Hanshan as a Beat poet that has primarily appealed to me. Without ever intending to be one, and certainly without joining any of the Beat organizations which nowadays flourish on line, I have been a Beat poet all my life, both beaten down and blessed, though never beatified.
For twenty years now I have lived a ten-minute walk from Shinobazu Pond in Tokyo’s Ueno Park. This whole area was once the Kan’ei-ji 寛永寺 temple complex, and much of it still is, including the lotus pond with its magnificent plants flowering from the primal mud of existence and symbolizing Buddhist paradise. Perhaps six months ago I became intrigued with a tiny circular island on the north side of Benzaiten 弁財天, the central shrine. It is kept locked except on Snake Days,  once every twelve days as figured by the old Chinese sexagenarian reckoning. Benzaiten is one of the Seven Gods of Good Fortune 七福神 in Japan, and her father was a white snake. Thus, the gate to this tiny island, called Shōtenjima / 聖天島, opens only on Snake Days. 
Of the many stone memorials on the island, two especially captured me, a statue of En no Gyōja 役行者, legendary founded of the Yamabushi 山伏, and the broken figure of a Kōshin 庚申, a name that defies translation, since his cult was banned in the Meiji Era and has died out, but a kind of god or guardian of crossroads and gates. Surprisingly it warrants an article in Wiki, where it is described as a “a folk faith in Japan with Taoist origins, influenced by Shinto, 
Buddhism and other local beliefs.” 

A typical event related to the faith is called Kōshin-kō (庚申講), held on the Kōshin days that occur every 60 days in accordance with the Chinese sexagenary cycle. On this day some believers stay awake to prevent Sanshi (三尸), entities believed to live inside the body of believers, from leaving it during that night in order to report the good and specially the bad deeds of the believer to the god . . .

The point should be taken that this is a folk religion with no hierarchy or formal organization. The cult was banned but the stone images remain, and they exist across the whole of traditional Japan (i.e., excluding Okinawa and Hokkaido.) With the widening of roads during the Meiji Era, the images were moved to undisturbed areas, often to the grounds of a nearby shrine.

Koshin, unbroken figure showing the amanojaku 
and the three monkeys under his feet

Walk through the torii 鳥居 seen seen at the start of this essay, and the Kōshin figure is on the far left, as is that of his companion En no Gyōja. A scholar of Japanese history and archaeology visited the island once, examined the statue, and told me that the stone was from the Jōmon Era. It has facial features now, and hands and feet, but originally it was a phallus, as everyone recognizes who sees it from behind. At some time the hands, feet, and face, were chiseled into the original phallus, probably by Meiji Era puritans who were embarrassed by vestiges of what they considered “paganism.” En faces outward, toward the water, as do almost all the stones on the island, reflecting the fact that it could only be approached by boat because no bridge had yet been built. 
This was the era when “tea houses” lined the banks of the pond on the Ueno Mountain side, such houses serving for assignations between prostitutes and their clients. These were customers who would likely have been much titillated by En’s shape.
The shape of the Kōshin is also not without interest. He treads on a poor devil known as a jaki or Amanojaku 天邪鬼. Underneath this downtrodden figure are three monkeys--speaking-, seeing-, hearing-no-evil--everywhere part of the Kōshin iconography. Part of the monkeys’ popularity over the centuries is surely due to a delicious pun in Japanese. The word for monkey, saru, is also a negative verbal suffix, so that negated “see” (miru) becomes mizaru; negated “hear” (kiku) becomes kikazaru; and negated “speak” (iu) becomes iwazaru. The three zaru (monkeys) with their negative imperatives must have  helped control vicious  gossip, the bane of village life.
Into the island’s rich historical broth, I decided to immerse Han Shan, that is insert him imaginatively by giving him a spiritual home there. He seemed happy enough with the idea and over the next two months gave me a total of fifty short verses, which you now hold in your hands. Whatever these verses are, they are not translations. I think of them rather as homages, instigations, and provocations inspired by my reading of Han Shan. 
As I say, I have avoided Snyder, and that means I’ve not touched any of the thirty poems he translated, but Han Shan is credited with some three hundred poems, so I still had plenty left for my instigations. My sources have been primarily two, a standard Japanese translation of the poems (an image of the book provides the front flyleaf), and Red Pine’s The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain. Both of these are cited in my “Sources” and both are academic translations, well done and excellent in their accuracy but not inspiringly poetic. I have profited most from Red Pine’s notes, which are lengthy and detailed and often sparkle with glints of gold panned from his historical researches.
These poems came to me in such an abundance over a two-month period that I felt less like a poet and more like an amanuensis. Somehow Han Shan began to speak to me, and I wrote down what I heard. In my years by Ueno Park, I’ve come to call myself Ueno Wayne, both for the word play and for fine nuance that is felt when a poet calls himself by the name of the place that inspires him. I’ve had to give a new name to Han Shan’s place of residence as well, and since what the Japanese are pleased to call Ueno Yama 上野山 is no mountain at all but rather a good sized hill, my Han Shan also uses the moniker No Mountain. 
The pun for No Mountain is obviously Noh Mountain but I’ve avoided it and the reader too should rid his mind of it. If anything, we should think of Donovan. “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.” Han Shan was not a zen monk. He was not any kind of Buddhist monk, for he liked to get drunk. He wasn’t a man of Zen either, but from our perspective today he may seem like one. He offers no precepts (though he does like to moralize) but represents a practice, and that practice, we can say, was zen-like. Red Pine is clear on this matter: “Certainly his poems reflect an understanding of both [Buddhism and Taoism], and he has been claimed by both orders. But he poked fun at Buddhists as much as at Taoists and presented himself as a man free of spiritual conceit, whatever its name” (14-15). Little is known about his life except legends. As he remarks in one of my poems, “It is not even certain I ever lived but my poems do.”
What follows are the poems spoken by No Mountain as recorded by his amanuensis Ueno Wayne.  Usually No Mountain responds to the world of the pond, but sometimes he gets topical, talking about the Monju nuclear plant, Prime Minister Abe, the corona virus, and other corporate disasters like Tokyo’s Drunk Poets. He can’t help it. He reads newspapers and he listens to people talk. The final poem, “No Mountain Bids Farewell,” was his last poem. After that he visited me no more.
Wayne would like to hear from any readers who would care to write him: poundsway@gmail.com. Or on FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/wpounds46

Tokyo, 1 April 2020
the day before his 74th birthday
the year of the Corona Virus

March 16, 2020

Dead Women I Have Held (1)

Barbara Louise Balfour, Dean of Men's daughter
her dad was cock of the university walk
professor of cellular biology
ombudsman, civic minded activist, 
a duck hunter hidden in his blind.
He twice won the Hope Award
"but I never had any," Barbara would say,
"not from him and not from my mother."

As faculty wives do Mrs. Balfour sought self-betterment
auditing graduate courses in the English Department
including one on the 20th century American novel
the prof kept talking about alienation
till one day Mrs. Balfour raised her hand and spoke,
"I don't understand why all these characters have to be lonely.
with all the many clubs and societies they could join."
I thought then of Barbara Louise, 
alone with the alone, unjoined, unappeased.

Schizophrenia has never been explained
the Greek simply means broken-heartedness.
Explain that to me, explain it to her father and mother--
a teen breaks in two, and the parts start yacking at each other.

Split-brained Barbara went back into asylum. 
"I don't have to live like this," she said. 
"Crafty Barbara acted sane," she’d tell me,
“they let her out of her cell,  a few days later she was dead." 
A decade later her prophesy came true. 
Daddy and Mama were Barb’s two faces—
the gifted girl who wrestled with The Faerie Queene
and the unclubbable one who couldn’t understand people.

Where are you tonight, sweet Louise
as I visit the white ashes they made of you
“I’m a woman made of paper,” you used to say—
the ones you wrote, the ones you read
the one they’d stamp when you were dead.
Did you ignite like paper at Fahrenheit 451
in the roar of that crematorium
when you became Daddy’s duck and shot yourself in the head?

June 30, 2015

"Mary Phagan" by Ueno Wayne

Grave of Mary Phagan
Find-a-Grave 
Mary Phagan


It wasn't no easy life making pencils,
But I’d rather lived it than died like I did.
They found me in the wee hours
The night of Confederate Memorial Day--
It was 1913 and I was 12 years old. 
Worked in the pencil factory with other kids,
Ran a knurling machine that put erasers into metal 
     bands.
For 55 hours, I got 4 dollars and 11 cents.

They found me, I wasn’t pretty no more,
A 7 foot strip of 3/4 inch wrapping cord around my neck
Buried in the skin 1/8 of an inch deep.
They measured everything. Then they grabbed
A Yankee from New York, Mr. Leo Frank
They called him Jew, whatever that is. It’s in the Bible.

The Governor said No, the trial wasn’t right,
So they took Mr. Frank and hanged him from a tree.
25 armed men, called themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan,
They carried him 150 miles to Frey’s Gin
Near where I lived in Marietta.
They took pictures, pieces of his nightshirt,
And bits of rope to sell as souvenirs.

Everyone wanted to be in the picture.
I could tell you the man did it but what would that change?
It was the janitor. I never knew his name.
Anyway, my great niece Mary Phagan Kean already done this.
She named the names, so everyone knows who killed Mr. Frank.
When you walk down the streets of Marietta
Their names are the ones on street signs, 
Shopping centers, and law offices.

Leo Frank (before)

Leo Frank (after)





October 9, 2013

"Delmore Schwartz" by John Gery




After a Poetry Reading, Delmore Schwartz Returns to His Hotel


That moment I walked in I lost my beauty.
And in a bookshop, no less! Everyone --
from grandparents and aunts I’d only glimpsed
above my crib, to that waitress with “Judy”
embossed across her breast who’d made a pun
on just dessert at lunch -- flashed by like hints

from some Talmudic commentary. Barely
composed, and wobbling, I tried to grin
to mask that I could feel my bowels cutting loose.
The boy behind the register then snared me
and asked if I’d be reading “Gunga Din,”
a poem he’d memorized in school. “Obtuse,”

I muttered, “what I write.” Fat books of verse
by poets I could not identify
marshaled the shelves, with me so lost among them
like Sherman at a powwow of Nez Perce,
my first impulse was to shoot. Who knows why.
Had I known any paeans I’d have sung one

to keep the drowsy store manager awake
as I mowed down “Biographies.” Instead,
I fingered through The Secret Life of Snails,
feigning surprise, until my bellyache
devoured my insides. I want to be dead,
forgotten. Everything I think of pales

next to this bourbon bottle by the bed,
browner than Chief Joseph. I had “potential”
once. My ambition ranked me with the giants.
After tonight, my genius scalped and shredded,
disgrace will seem about as consequential
as melting poetry down to a science.


 (Poem first published in Interdisciplinary Humanities)