Eric Ekstrand

Out here in the desert, everything is one thing: the desert. What god but the One God, exotic in his reachless amount casting love over our encampment beside the nervy water of Jordan? John, you have a little gristle when you speak and what’s left of you is the scrape of a year starved on grasshoppers. It is touching to see the basin of your devoted body. A little bit east, whole lambs were smeared on the temple. The city was coiled, white within its walls (violet), its muscles twisting over muscles. The temple, sleek at the top, smiled with music—it might’ve lifted for a second. I was just there. The priests wore such tall hats, heavenly bodies dropped behind their eyes. The mothers of Jerusalem suggested curtains tattering down from the markets that whirred with the songs of bargaining, parting one from the other, laughing home. The dust lifted into the hair of the peaceful citizens and was shaken out. The land was socializing. The invalids were blind as stars; the children plaited their hair in a manner pleasing to mountain lions: the boys; the trumpets bellowed like lonely bulls—they were distressed, despite their red velvet dresses; the widows were wrapping themselves in silk as their sons carried nearby stones outside the city; mules were begging to be beaten with softer sticks; a yellowing vine was making love to a young tree; grape skins were staining the feet of dancers; merchant’s fingers became little bodies which wrapped themselves around each coin; cups of hot tea startled the mouths of the idle; a tangle of serpents tried to choose just one mate; the lit membrane of a sheet hung in a window to dry, itself a heavenly body. I could go on, John, but why leave the sheet? What sermon on hope or virtue can you make that is more convincing than it? Leaving the city was a wrenching kind of death, but lying here by you, John, in rocks and flat dirt—Heaven is unexpected.

The spine is a slide of human marvels; it is a hierarchy of white florets; it is a cult of secret brothers; it is a deliberate list; so look how the spineless relax in their unblushing banality. I lose my patience in Greensboro where no discoveries are ever made and the only inner lavishment is the bar, occasionally. T he spineless aspire to incessant interludes that never arrive anywhere and that can’t r emember wherefrom they came. Mary is slightly spineless, for instance: her dress is cream her skin is cream her creamy mind is fine and her life will end finely—how sad is that to think of, the finery of a cream life? It is the saddest of all truths that can be read on a person’s face in a decorous garden that person has planted themselves and of which they are explaining to you the intricacies and expense: “notice how in the light”; “three pallets shipped last week”; “have complementary attitudes when it comes to soil-type and moisture.” She isn’t wicked; but, also, she destroys the art of her life.

I have a need to ventilate, to have my porous body—sockets and holes—open to the bald-faced wind and have my heathen   inner-stuff tweedled like a reed flute and this piffle floats out. But walking on the open road, I know even open roads, to be roads at all, are ruts. With a careless beanfield on either side, off one more time, even you, Mr. Out-in-the-Woods, might as well be stuffed in your hometown bucket. And if these grim beams of trees are truly home, Sweet, as you say they are, then the timberwolves would reclaim you by singing and that would be all. The Moon would reclaim the timberwolves—not a snarl—soft keepsakes asleep in the palm of Her hand. I would reclaim the Moon by picking a white silk chrysanthemum and resting it on the branch beside Her. Who would reclaim me? and say, “Blossom, we are not two. There is no road to or from. You cannot write a love poem. You cannot walk away.” Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones .

Bashō, with your grass pillow, what underground sounds come into your dreams? Do blue-horned beetles scratch against the starless night sky that lines your head with the starless night skies of their own domed backs? Do centipedes trickle through? Do worms burrow with their snouts, with their bodies that are entirely snouts? Snoozer, I can only ask you this because now you are dead asleep: Do I ever appear as a nightcrawler whispering in your ear? Are the words, “I love you,” as soft as the cough of a good luck cricket? Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones .

Clamber out of the morning river with water beads like fish eggs clung to your pubis the calluses on your buttocks from sitting, writing on flat rocks, your goose-pimpled thighs—the bumpy tongues of two dogs licking each other—and river-slather and slather at the edge of my mouth. You are smiling, straining out your hair, flicking your hands, and then see me watching you with the cloth and pots I was taking to wash. Before I have time to be embarrassed, the smile lifts into your eyes. Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones .

Difficult shacks of Kushiro, too far afield, at least theirs are not our roofless griefs even farther in the marshes that are huge buckets of green tea in the rainy season—you glisten as you go, Bashō, wring out your sleeves. Frog keeps its knees in its armpits on plant flotilla and Duck of all the birds is shaped most like a canoe. We were not built for this and anyway, standing smack dab in no-man’s-land you can stop and say,Here is a place made famous in poems. Aren’t you such a place? Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones .

When History turns soldiers into battles, you turn them into grass. Bashō, Sweet, is it honorable? But for these men who died with grunts and clangs in their ears, for their horses with snapped legs, I haven’t got the art to make them into anything. I fold the grass in the shape of a man, very literal, very primitive and leave it on the field and say, “Forgive me valorous men for my ineptitude.” Just then, the little man falls down in the wind and—huh!—there is art. Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones .