Appleblossom

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 .