You in the shade of a tree

For some time now I have been aware
of your eyes fixed on me from the shade of a tree.
You, so fondly treasured by your husband,
are radiant with a fair glow like a Renoir
or a Titian.
I have been tempered by toilsome sparks of fires
all by myself, gasping for air.
Now I stand tall on my ground
managing to speak with your husband.
I am no longer embarrassed
I behave simply as a wholesome human being –
Yet I am aware.
Your eyes, so blue they look dewy, glisten
with worries and apprehensions.
My proud heart grows tender
deeply moved by women’s frailty
I slowly hang down my head.


Your husband is truly exceptional;
It is a small joy for me to stand before him,
as your keen insight tells you.
You see clearly
my tempered skin glowing gold.
Beyond that, you know that I came
in a blouse with many frills like clouds.
Also you know I am wearing a brand-new hat.
You are intent on seeing through everything.
A wistful tide surges inside me.
Honestly I am not trying to take anything from you.
I am simply pleased to be able to speak to him
as a self-reliant person,
ah, not disturbed by anything malicious –

My heart slowly gradually wilts
To think, ah why is it, how frail we are, we women –


-Kiyoko Nagase
Translation: 2009, Takako Lento

Seawater stiffens cloth long after it's dried.

As pain after it’s ended stays in the body:

A woman moves her hands oddly

because her grandfather passed through

a place he never spoke of. Making

instead the old jokes with angled fingers.

Call one thing another’s name long enough,

it will answer. Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer.

Call it a tree whose shape of   branches happened.

Call what branching happened a man

whose job it was to break fingers or lose his own.

Call fingers angled like branches what peel and cut apples,

to give to a girl who eats them in silence, looking.

Call her afterward tree, call her seawater angled by silence. 

Jane Hirshfield "Seawater Stiffens Cloth"

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sunlight absence

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

-Seamus Heaney Personal Helican

We have a sunlight absence here in the Northwest. Like Ireland, I tell myself, only here the eye concedes to a horizon of firs rather than bogs. There is much that is familiar in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. And today, this dark gloomy day is sweet Tadzio's birthday. Like all small children, he approaches our foul weather with good cheer and delight. Before cake and presents he is bundled up in his raincoat and boots, attending the model train show with his Papa.

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From the Person of the Playful Star

We roll the dice
And play our game, we the people
Of the playful star
Doing the forbidden and
Turning the skies round and round

Born as we are onto
This playful star of deep green
Why is it we do
Not dedicate ourselves to
Playing for all we are worth?

-Excerpt From Chimako Tada's "Tanka From the Person of the Playful Star "
Translation by Jeffrey Angles

Translator's Note: The words “playful star” are a literal rendering of the word yūsei (遊星) meaning “planet.” (Ancient Chinese astronomers saw the planets as “playful stars” that wandered across the heavens according to their own whimsical logic. This word, inherited from Chinese, is still used in modern Japan.)

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in order to arrive at what you are not

In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.


T.S. Eliot "East Coker" No. 2 of "Four Quartets"

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to cuddle and to clutch you

When the days grow short and dark, we disappear into our books, and, perhaps best of all, theater. Last night we took Tadzio to see Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel. The most interesting and enchanting scene of the whole opera for me was the scene in the haunted forest with Hansel, Gretel, and the Sandman. The lighting, music, acting and movement of this scene were beautiful. The Sandman's solo is haunting and lyrical.

Fly you fool

The Himalayan legend says
there are beautiful white birds
that live completely in flight.
They are born in the air,

must learn to fly before falling
and die also in their flying.
Maybe you have been born
into such a life

with the bottom dropping out.
Maybe gravity is claiming you
and you feel
ghost-scripted.


For the one who lives inside the fall,
the sky beneath the sky of all.

Jennifer K. Sweeney "In Flight"

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she learned her hands in a fairy-tale

She is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun 'tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.

Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Witch Wife"

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