Dango

Mankai (Full Bloom)

Such a delicate pink mixed with
the green foliage,
not overpowering with ruffles & ruffles
of wedding festive cloth,
no borderline gaudy popcorn wigs
these cherry blossoms,
but icing on the rich cake of a dark shrine
anchored by one large, old rope encircled
elm, 3 or 4 or five hundred years
no one knows, this old religious forest
sprawling in a way that I thought was
lost in Tokyo, hidden in the quiet hilly folds
just a spit from Roppongi crossing
and Akasaka short-time hotels--
Petals have reached full bloom,
already taking flight.

In the Time of Hay Fever

What I have become these days
in between jobs and under the influence of pollen,
the worst kind of drug, one that keeps me continually
shuffling and snuffling up and down these
station stairs alone, even in company

Through the blocked passages and droopy eyelids
the warm weather and flowers of spring lose their savor,
everything running in slow motion as I try to grasp
what passed minutes ago

What dire wolf or evil-doer incarnate
could have devised a more severe penance for
the satisfaction of a few days off in the time
women in heat, letting their hair down,
well, not to be excluded I went to the club
and danced with a few

Still, with an accoustic Dead set circa `70
some diet coke and a roll of toilet paper bedside
I am not in as bad a position as some
and for that truly thankful.

a slight chuckle from the hay feverish poet

It would have been less amusing
if I had been able to breathe the past week,
an immense hazy cloud in the satellite imagery
mistaken for wildfire by lookouts
in the low mountains of Gunma

A team of fire fighters sent in with all dispatch,
a cedar pollen thick as mustard gas--
they could not stop sneezing, eyes watering and burning,
pollen burrowing its way into every pore and crevace

Brave indeed those who,
taking a vast cloud of pollen for smoke
ventured into that microscopic morass--
Better the lick of fire, walls of flame,
great billowing black-plume infernos
than this slow death by itching powder,
wheeze and laughing gas.

(2005, the year levels of pollen in Japan were 30 times higher than normal)

an opening

Almost a year into Japan I took a bicycle ride
along the Hanamigawa to enlarge perimeters
and discover what would ultimately become home.

My original flat was situated among old and old seeming
houses and small apartments along what had been the Tokyo Bay coast, and is now the number 14 Narita-Tokyo expressway.

I passed many weekends riding the faintly deliniated boundary between old and new which runs all the way
to Tokyo, a hint of a hill, old fishing houses and larger
wood walled family enclosures interspersed with condos
and cheaply built apartments. On the other side of the imaginary coast a flat grey wasteland of taller apartment buildings, wide roads, graffiti.

It took me months to discover that the little canal which I crossed on my way to the all-you-can-eat yaki nikku place
was in fact the mouth of a larger and rather well respected river, a place where fishermen and local residents took weekend walks or bicycle rides.

Now my days had color, a zipper opened and revealed a hidden world of farms and trees under the urban jacket, and the further I went the more luxuriant the colors and sounds, at one point around a bend upstream there was no sight but forest, no sound but birds and my mind played tricks that I was in a Japan that had not changed in 150 years. Rounding the bend I came to another suburb.

Yet persistently, crossing this new and smaller suburb, the land yielded a wider flat of rice field, and higher wooded hills, in which nestled inumerable shrines and small farm houses, the people one passed by the river now not so much weekenders but sun darkened farmers or fishermen working and chatting in earthy accents.

Though I ventured far I had not biked so far as the place I took a train ride to, that clear May afternoon, connected, as I later found out by the same umbilical cord river to the Tokyo Bay.

This was the Japan of my dreams, a quiet leafy suburb that petered out 10 minutes from the station into an expansive marsh, connected via cycling course to a larger marsh and finally to the Tono river.

As I walked along the lake side path, amid spaces much greater than I had experienced in Japan, I felt the stress pack of urban life dissipate, enfolded in a landscape not so different from California. Somewhere in short I could call home.