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drawing a breath between each sentence, trailing closely every word. — James Hoch, ‘Draft’ in Miscreants 1. some things, I knew, were beyond choosing: didu — grandmother — wilting under cancer’s terminal care. mama — my uncle’s — mysterious disappearance — ventilator vibrating, severed silently, in the hospital’s unkempt dark. an old friend’s biting silence — unexplained — promised loyalties melting for profit abandoning long familial presences of trust. devi’s jealous heart      misreading emails hacked carefully under cover, her fingernails ripping unformed poems, bloodied, scarred — my diary pages weeping wordlessly — my children aborted, my poetry breathless forever. 2. these are acts that enact themselves, regardless — helpless, as I am, torn asunder permanently, drugged, numbed. strange love, this is — a salving: what medics and nurses do. i live buddha-like, unblinking, a painted vacant smile — one that stores pain and painlessness — someone else’s nirvana thrust upon me. some things I once believed in are beyond my choosing — choosing is a choice unavailable to me.

Allegiance is assigned Forever when the mind Chooses and stamps the will. Thus, I must love you still Through good and ill. But though we cannot part We may retract the heart And build such privacies As self-regard agrees Conduce to ease. So manners will repair The ravage of despair Which generous love invites, Preferring quiet nights To vain delights.

To stand for once outside my faith to steady it caught and squirming on a stick up to mind’s inviting light and name it! for all its faults and facets or keep waiting to be claimed in it

The Crow call this time of year the Black Cherry Moon when the rose hips are blood-bright, spattered on their overwrought stems, and the creek calls so clearly in words almost our own as we come sliding down the bank. Last night, we covered the gardens in plastic. The chickadees were back after their wide diet of summer. We ate the last trout, its spine curved from disease. So much can go wrong, I want to know what you will promise me as our hands reach in and in through the copper, the carmine leaves. I know you are lonely, alone with your grief for your parents who are not my parents, for your life, which, despite all, is not my life. The cherries are thick here, hanging in clusters, purple-black from frost. It started to rain and I am chilled by it. Each day, we promise, we will talk of our fears of intimacy, how we still expect to be hurt when we love. You bring me a coat from the back of the truck, but I want to stop our task now, to sit in the cab of the truck while the gray spills, slick with thunder. What if I kissed you there in depth. After so many years, I can misunderstand the difference between instinct and obligation, how my hand continues to grasp the stems. Keats said poems should come easy as leaves off the trees, but see how they cling and wrestle with their ties. And now, the sun shines. It is not this grace I had imagined. When Keats said poems, I meant love. The chokecherries roll easily into my palm, then fall into the plastic bag that binds my writs. Over and over, until we have enough, until our fingers are bruised with their dark juices.

(Kamo-no-Chomei, born at Kamo 1154, died at Toyama on Mount Hino, 24th June 1216) Swirl sleeping in the waterfall! On motionless pools scum appearing disappearing! Eaves formal on the zenith, lofty city Kyoto, wealthy, without antiquities! Housebreakers clamber about, builders raising floor upon floor at the corner sites, replacing gardens by bungalows. In the town where I was known the young men stare at me. A few faces I know remain. Whence comes man at his birth? or where does death lead him? Whom do you mourn? Whose steps wake your delight? Dewy hibiscus dries: though dew outlast the petals. I have been noting events forty years. On the twentyseventh May eleven hundred and seventyseven, eight p.m., fire broke out at the corner of Tomi and Higuchi streets. In a night palace, ministries, university, parliament were destroyed. As the wind veered flames spread out in the shape of an open fan. Tongues torn by gusts stretched and leapt. In the sky clouds of cinders lit red with the blaze. Some choked, some burned, some barely escaped. Sixteen great officials lost houses and very many poor. A third of the city burned; several thousands died; and of beasts, limitless numbers. Men are fools to invest in real estate. Three years less three days later a wind starting near the outer boulevard broke a path a quarter mile across to Sixth Avenue. Not a house stood. Some were felled whole, some in splinters; some had left great beams upright in the ground and round about lay rooves scattered where the wind flung them. Flocks of furniture in the air, everything flat fluttered like dead leaves. A dust like fog or smoke, you could hear nothing for the roar, bufera infernal! Lamed some, wounded some. This cyclone turned southwest. Massacre without cause. Portent? The same year thunderbolted change of capital, fixed here, Kyoto, for ages. Nothing compelled the change nor was it an easy matter but the grumbling was disproportionate. We moved, those with jobs or wanting jobs or hangers on of the rest, in haste haste fretting to be the first. Rooftrees overhanging empty rooms; dismounted: floating down the river. The soil returned to heath. I visited the new site narrow and too uneven, cliffs and marshes, deafening shores, perpetual strong winds; the palace a logcabin dumped amongst the hills (yet not altogether inelegant). There was no flat place for houses, many vacant lots, the former capital wrecked, the new a camp, and thoughts like clouds changing, frayed by a breath: peasants bewailing lost land, newcomers aghast at prices. No one in uniform: the crowds resembled demobilized conscripts. There were murmurs. Time defined them. In the winter the decree was rescinded, we returned to Kyoto; but the houses were gone and none could afford to rebuild them. I have heard of a time when kings beneath bark rooves watched chimneys. When smoke was scarce, taxes were remitted. To appreciate present conditions collate them with those of antiquity. Drought, floods, and a dearth. Two fruitless autumns. Empty markets, swarms of beggars. Jewels sold for a handful of rice. Dead stank on the curb, lay so thick on Riverside Drive a car couldnt pass. The pest bred. That winter my fuel was the walls of my own house. Fathers fed their children and died, babies died sucking the dead. The priest Hoshi went about marking their foreheads A, Amida, their requiem; he counted them in the East End in the last two months, fortythree thousand A’s. Crack, rush, ye mountains, bury your rills! Spread your green glass, ocean, over the meadows! Scream, avalanche, boulders amok, strangle the dale! O ships in the sea’s power, O horses On shifting roads, in the earth’s power, without hoofhold! This is the earthquake, this was the great earthquake of Genryaku! The chapel fell, the abbey, the minster and the small shrines fell, their dust rose and a thunder of houses falling. O to be birds and fly or dragons and ride on a cloud! The earthquake, the great earthquake of Genryaku! A child building a mud house against a high wall: I saw him crushed suddenly, his eyes hung from their orbits like two tassels. His father howled shamelessly—an officer. I was not abashed at his crying. Such shocks continued three weeks; then lessening, but still a score daily as big as an average earthquake; then fewer, alternate days, a tertian ague of tremors. There is no record of any greater. It caused a religious revival. Months ... Years ... ........... Nobody mentions it now. This is the unstable world and we in it unstable and our houses. A poor man living amongst the rich gives no rowdy parties, doesnt sing. Dare he keep his child at home, keep a dog? He dare not pity himself above a whimper. But he visits, he flatters, he is put in his place, he remembers the patch on his trousers. His wife and sons despise him for being poor. He has no peace. If he lives in an alley of rotting frame houses he dreads a fire. If he commutes he loses his time and leaves his house daily to be plundered by gunmen. The bureaucrats are avaricious. He who has no relatives in the Inland Revenue, poor devil! Whoever helps him enslaves him and follows him crying out:Gratitude! If he wants success he is wretched. If he doesnt he passes for mad. Where shall I settle, what trade choose that the mind may practise, the body rest? My grandmother left me a house but I was always away for my health and because I was alone there. When I was thirty I couldnt stand it any longer, I built a house to suit myself: one bamboo room, you would have thought it a cartshed, poor shelter from snow or wind. It stood on the flood plain. And that quarter is also flooded with gangsters. One generation I saddened myself with idealistic philosophies, but before I was fifty I perceived there was no time to lose, left home and conversation. Among the cloudy mountains of Ohara spring and autumn, spring and autumn, spring and autumn, emptier than ever. The dew evaporates from my sixty years, I have built my last house, or hovel, a hunter’s bivouac, an old silkworm’s cocoon: ten feet by ten, seven high: and I, reckoning it a lodging not a dwelling, omitted the usual foundation ceremony. I have filled the frames with clay, set hinges at the corners; easy to take it down and carry it away when I get bored with this place. Two barrowloads of junk and the cost of a man to shove the barrow, no trouble at all. Since I have trodden Hino mountain noon has beaten through the awning over my bamboo balcony, evening shone on Amida. I have shelved my books above the window, lute and mandolin near at hand, piled bracken and a little straw for bedding, a smooth desk where the light falls, stove for bramblewood. I have gathered stones, fitted stones for a cistern, laid bamboo pipes. No woodstack, wood enough in the thicket. Toyama, snug in the creepers! Toyama, deep in the dense gully, open westward whence the dead ride out of Eden squatting on blue clouds of wistaria. (Its scent drifts west to Amida.) Summer? Cuckoo’s Follow, follow—to harvest Purgatory hill! Fall? The nightgrasshopper will shrill Fickle life! Snow will thicken on the doorstep, melt like a drift of sins. No friend to break silence, no one will be shocked if I neglect the rite. There’s a Lent of commandments kept where there’s no way to break them. A ripple of white water after a boat, shining water after the boats Mansami saw rowing at daybreak at Okinoya. Between the maple leaf and the caneflower murmurs the afternoon—Po Lo-tien saying goodbye on the verge of Jinyo river. (I am playing scales on my mandolin.) Be limber, my fingers, I am going to play Autumn Wind to the pines, I am going to play Hastening Brook to the water. I am no player but there’s nobody listening, I do it for my own amusement. Sixteen and sixty, I and the gamekeeper’s boy, one zest and equal, chewing tsubana buds, one zest and equal, persimmon, pricklypear, ears of sweetcorn pilfered from Valley Farm. The view from the summit: sky bent over Kyoto, picnic villages, Fushimi and Toba: a very economical way of enjoying yourself. Thought runs along the crest, climbs Sumiyama; beyond Kasatori it visits the great church, goes on pilgrimage to Ishiyama (no need to foot it!) or the graves of poets, of Semimaru who said: Somehow or other we scuttle through a lifetime. Somehow or other neither palace nor straw-hut is quite satisfactory.

T HE single clenched fist lifted and ready, Or the open asking hand held out and waiting. Choose: For we meet by one or the other.

A Creole boy from the West Indies brought, To be in European learning taught, Some years before to Westminster he went, To a Preparatory school was sent. When from his artless tale the mistress found The child had not one friend on English ground, She ev’n as if she his own mother were, Made the dark Indian her particular care. Oft on her favourite’s future lot she thought; To know the bent of his young mind she sought, For much the kind preceptress wished to find To what profession he was most inclined, That where his genius led they might him train; For nature’s kindly bent she held not vain. But vain her efforts to explore his will; The frequent question he evaded still; Till on a day at length he to her came, Joy sparkling in his eyes; and said, the same Trade he would be those boys of colour were, Who danced so happy in the open air. It was a troop of chimney-sweeping boys, With wooden music and obstreperous noise, In tarnish’d finery and grotesque array, Were dancing in the streets the first of May.

Come the marrow-hours when he couldn't sleep, the boy river-brinked and chorded. Mud-bedded himself here in the root-mesh; bided. Sieved our alluvial sounds— Perseverating fiddler-crabs pockworking the pluff-mud; (perforated) home-bank gurgle and seethe; breathing burrow-holes, under-warrens, (pitched) pent-forts, coverts; a rabbity heart-hammering amongst the canes; bleat of something; sleeping Mama grinding (something) with her jaw; Daddy rut-graving gravel driving off; the desolated train-trestle rust-buckling   —and falling; an echo-tolling cast-iron skillet like a gong; downrivering gone(gone)gone(gone); Sylvia supper-calling her fish-camp fish with a bell; putting her tea kettle! wren-calls on for the crying marsh-wren orphans; R.T. tale-telling down by Norton's Store "Where every Story cauls a Grief"; Daddy   —nine-eyed,knee-walking—   aisle-weeping at the Bi-Lo; Mama mash-sucking sour loquats in the shed; ire-salts quartzifying in the dark; the caustics; the fires; far Fever Creek revival-tents hymning and balming; bees thrive-gilding the glade; hand-strang bottle-oaks (and intricated yardwire-works) clocking and panging; Viaduct Forge & Foundry beating time; the bait-boys along the dock drum-dunting their buckets; vowel-howling over the water; the river; RIVER.

A man steps out of sunlight, sunlight that streams like grace, still gaping at blue sky staked across the emptiness of space, into a history where shadows assume a human face. A man slips into silence that began as a cry, still trailing music although reduced to the sigh of an accordion as it folds into its case.

Love, what ailed thee to leave life that was made lovely, we thought, with love? What sweet visions of sleep lured thee away, down from the light above? What strange faces of dreams, voices that called, hands that were raised to wave, Lured or led thee, alas, out of the sun, down to the sunless grave? Ah, thy luminous eyes! once was their light fed with the fire of day; Now their shadowy lids cover them close, hush them and hide away. Ah, thy snow-coloured hands! once were they chains, mighty to bind me fast; Now no blood in them burns, mindless of love, senseless of passion past. Ah, thy beautiful hair! so was it once braided for me, for me; Now for death is it crowned, only for death, lover and lord of thee. Sweet, the kisses of death set on thy lips, colder are they than mine; Colder surely than past kisses that love poured for thy lips as wine. Lov'st thou death? is his face fairer than love's, brighter to look upon? Seest thou light in his eyes, light by which love's pales and is overshone? Lo the roses of death, grey as the dust, chiller of leaf than snow! Why let fall from thy hand love's that were thine, roses that loved thee so? Large red lilies of love, sceptral and tall, lovely for eyes to see; Thornless blossom of love, full of the sun, fruits that were reared for thee. Now death's poppies alone circle thy hair, girdle thy breasts as white; Bloodless blossoms of death, leaves that have sprung never against the light. Nay then, sleep if thou wilt; love is content; what should he do to weep? Sweet was love to thee once; now in thine eyes sweeter than love is sleep.