Prayer At the Tomb of My Wife's Grandfather
Tomori, Okinawa, April 2003
You should know that I do not believe the spirit exists
after the body expires. I prefer the tangible:
tiny red spiders crawling through kanji
carved from volcanic stone;
cane leaves blown by wind, reaching
like green fingers toward my flesh
as I walked here; and ashes, and
shards of bone swaddled by a handkerchief
inside a concrete crypt.
In these things there is the succor of certainty.
Ivy has invaded, you must know. It will crack this place,
sure as a typhoon, tendrils lapping into joints, seeking water.
We clear it, strip it away without speaking, leaving
nothing, not even memory, nothing.
Later, the women will make miso in your house,
still your house after five years.
I will move your wife into the dinner chair,
holding her like a talisman
in my hands, feeling two
creaking coral shoulders.
When I am dying I will
think back to this moment,
in this land where the word for poetry
sounds like death, where inside
my chest I am sure
my heart smells like sugarcane.
Memory
Walking along Dead Horse Creek, we
saw our footprints bubble into absence
behind us as mud filled them.
Scratched our way along cottonwoods,
alders, branches snapping back
into position as we passed. You
are telling me about your divorce,
being removed from the landscape
of your own life. Childrens' toys gone
in the same van as crucifixes, clothing, old
sports trophies, forgotten until they
had to be moved. Now,
here is what we have come to see!
A burst of mountain goats, down
from the North Cascades, forced
to the lowlands by snow swaddling
Sauk Mountain. White, they bob
along the ridge above us, flanks
mottled a dishwater grey. (Remember
reading how their hairs weave
into winter snowshoes for those hooves -
then relent). To think out of 10,000
these are now part of just 100. You joke
about your elk gun, that thirty years ago you
could shoot anything that moved,
kill anything is what you mean.
A pressure change and they are gone
Into the white fog, a burial shroud
For the old gods.
We stand awhile,
And then walk on. |