Basho's Child WS Merwin In the Christmas spirit


Basho’s Child
//Beside the Fuji River/ there is a lost child crying/ dead for three hundred years/and who knows how many more/since the evening in autumn/when her mother carried her/out to the water noise/that would cover the sound of her crying/and then walked back into the silence/and the child cried all night/and into the frosty daylight/when the men who discovered her/stood over her like shadows/their hands talking but only/to each other until one of them/at last bent to put something on the leaves beside her/ before they all went away/with the sound of her drying/following him and following the words he would write about her / wherever the words might go
THE SHADOW OF SIRIUS WS MERWIN 2009  p 70
 
 
 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Giacometti, Yanaihara Isaku.

Image
Yanaihara Isaku was 38 years old at the beginning of his stay in Paris. A recommendation of Jean Wahl had allowed him to get a scholarship from CNRS. In his homeland, he taught philosophy at the University of Osaka; he wrote and meditated about Rouault, Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus which he translated  The Myth of Sisyphus  . After the parenthesis of a trip to Greece and Italy, he had agreed to pose for the artist he met at an exhibition for autumn 1955. This decision  transformed his life. Immediate consequence, she brought him to extend his stay in France: Alberto had always need new work days to specify what the disconcerted and frightened from his friend's face.  "Your face ... I see everything tiny and terribly huge ... I must paint the two together. "  Yanaihara had planned to leave for a trip to Egypt before joining Japan. His departure was constantly postponed: Giacometti desperate to complete the portraits he had...
Read more

Pauline Kael house with Jess Collins murals, Berkeley

Image
my favorite mural Very exciting!  This house may become a poetry center, like the wonderful house, UPENN has, for its poetry readings.  But right now, it is still in a process of negotiation, as Sotheby's realtor, creatively organizes a committee to "save the house" and murals.  Christopher Wagstaff, author of a recent exhibition catalogue, the exhibition which is touring and currently in Pasadena, having been at the Grey Art Gallery in NYC, and at the Crocker in summer 2013) - unfortunately I was in China.  The exhibition centers on the relationship and work of Robert Duncan, Poet, whose work I greatly admire(and did as a UW student) and in NYC where I heard him read once before his death.  Pauline Kael is a legend and of course, I read her theater reviews, and heard her speak at the Y92 in NYC, in the 70s.  I never knew she started for a decade in Berkeley writing her reviews.  Her correspondence with poet Robert Duncan (1940-1946) has...
Read more

HD THOREAU. Quotes and comments about Holland Cotter

Holland Cotter, in  “Lessons in Constructive Solitude" observes that   Thoreau used his self-quarantine at Walden, to pursue an intensive course in self education.   In the present pandemic moment, there’s plenty to learn from standing still.” // An intensive course in self education:   “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”   The list he compiled was long, ambitious and culturally far – readhing, stretching from Classical Greece to Vedic India”… I would add, China. Many studies have been done on Thoreau in China…I traced his Chinese references while living there.   “ In a letter to a friend he wrote: “ The Yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things.  To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi .”   He made his life at Walden one of those intervals.”   Cotter goes on to say, “(Interestingly, ...
Read more