David Mura

After wandering years Basho returned to gaze at his umbilical cord pickled in a jar. Plopped in brine years ago like the frog in the pond in his famous haiku. Of course fame meant nothing to him. He stood in the blazing rain in his family graveyard and as a crow squawked overhead the stones proclaimed him the last of his line. He kept feeling inside his straw raincoat for a missing limb or the hole where the wind and rain flew in. I'll get drunk tonight, he thought, and his eyelashes glistened as he trudged back to his hermit's hut to gaze again at the jar.

A wound is a blossom but only to the living. A May night, birdsong before the first light pierces, chirps out of blackness: My daughter's angry at me and her mother as I was once angry at mine. It's a way of crossing over. I'm so tired now. And my core's all water, flowing somewhere where the sea can't find her. And neither can I. How much longer till I finally lose her? Where is the first dawn wet blossom? Who recalls how I touched her mother once? Or many others? How night is not always easy. Nor are daughters. Nor are sons. And how is it I've become a father watching light sift slowly into the daughterless dark.