Arsenic Lobster poetry journal |
Issue Twenty-six Summer 2011 |
| Home | Current Issue | Contributors | Review | 2012 Pushcart Nominees | Order | Archive | Submission | About Us | Misty | |
NARROW ROAD Ted Deppe At seventeen, after reading Narrow Road to the Deep North, I enrolled in Japanese class, planning to retrace Basho’s walk. Failing to learn his language, I re-imagined my journey, hiked instead a circle around Ireland, though Basho came with me as guide. I got off the Rosslare ferry, reciting his lines, “With a bit of madness in me which is poetry, I plod along like Chikusai among the wails of the wind." ~ Forty years later, living in Ireland now, I dream I trek into a village where I’m met by dancers in Japanese costumes. Music of pipes and drums, multicolored fans that flutter like wings, as sparrow dancers fly around me. My dream-self lifts two or three feet above the street and realizes, “This is a gift. This is the journey I didn’t make.” ~ For decades I’ve looked for a poem Issa may have written, though maybe bicycling no-handed to Japanese class I wrote it myself. If somehow I am the author, it must be my finest poem: Sing and fly, sing and fly, all day long—so much to do, the busy little sparrows. Last night, searching the Internet for the elusive poem, I found Issa’s name hidden in Missa Solemnis, Renaissance, and croissant. ~ After a week of writing about Japan, I wake to news of a 9.0 earthquake near Sendai. I try to reach friends in Donegal whose daughter is in Japan, then wonder if they’ve already left to visit her. Checking my journal for 1970, I find I’d planned to fly to Tokyo, and then—because the modern city has swallowed the first stages of Basho’s walk— take a train to Sendai, begin my journey there. ~ Basho wrote, “We crossed the river Natori and went into Sendai. It was the day when people hang blue irises beneath the eaves.” On television, a 13-foot wave of water, mud, and burning buildings engulfs Sendai’s airport. Faced with the loss of so many, it doesn’t matter that the road I might have walked has vanished —or the road Basho did walk, in new sandals with iris-blue straps. ~ An explosion in a nuclear reactor in Fukushima. In 1970, I’d have passed there traveling from Tokyo to Sendai; today, four trains are missing. After Sendai, I’d have come to another landscape that’s devastated now, Matsushima, which Basho called Japan’s most beautiful place. Trying to describe those 260 tiny islands, some crowned with a single pine, he wrote: Matsushima, ah! A-ah, Matsushima, ah! Matsushima, ah! ~ Then we’re in St-Rémy-de-Provence, celebrating a birthday, while the situation in Fukushima grows much worse. We visit the hospital where for over a year Van Gogh lived. At the entrance, irises, and a traffic mirror where a sparrow keeps flinging itself at a reflected sparrow. The only other tourists at the hospital are Japanese. Usually so animated, today everyone looks half here, half ten-thousands-miles away. ~ Even the blossoming almond tree in the hospital garden with its white impasto petals against a vivid blue sky seems both itself and a memory of a tree painted here once. Out of sight, beyond these flowering branches, grief beyond measure. Back at the hotel, looking again for Issa’s busy little sparrows, I find instead: Beginning of spring – sparrows at the gate with their little faces. ~ Woke at 6, thinking this poem must be written in sixes, for the sixth of August, or threes, for the Trinity test site, and rising to find a pen, startled my wife. I said I’ll be right back up, which made her fear I was disoriented since our room is on the ground floor. Don’t worry, I told her, though I was thinking of the world’s end. ~ A five-minute Internet clip, filmed by a student who’d reached safety on a hill, shows the tsunami entering Nakatsugawa City. People are still down there, fleeing for the wooded slopes as the torrent surges towards them. Constant shouts; some run ahead, some stop to help each other, and one figure goes back towards those who are delayed. You don’t need to know Japanese to understand. ~ I’ve reached our friends, who were indeed in Tokyo when the quake hit. The subway closed, so they walked the crowded, snowy streets toward their hotel, and when they stopped to rest, an elderly shopkeeper offered his coat to their daughter and her five-week-old child. In Galway, these sparrows. Their little faces. In Japan, whole towns are gone, and a second, maybe a third reactor is on fire— |
| Next Poem |
| Home | Current Issue | Contributors | Review | 2012 Pushcart Nominees | Order | Archive | Submission | About Us | Misty | |