Frightening Things

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.