Appleblossom

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 .