After Matsuo Basho
Arise! Arise! I
want you with me on my road,
sleeping butterfly!
Spring calls beginnings,
yet in solitary thought
lies the fall gloaming.
Is it for spring’s sake
that this small, nameless mountain
hides in morning haze?
From what tree’s blossoms
does it waft? I wish I knew —
this phantom perfume!
Moon of the pond’s sky,
I meander about you,
and night is over.
Sometimes the clouds come
to arrest our eyes, give rest
from this moon-gazing.
Where the starling flies
till sight loses its wings,
there lies one island.
The island adrift
in a wild sea; overhead
flows heaven’s river.
The day is so still
their voices drill into stone —
the locusts calling.
Did it shrill until
it became only echo?
— this cicada shell.
In the deep prairie
sunken in its solitude
the lark sings and sings.
Waving summer grass:
the dead weave dreams of it,
the warriors sleeping.
In the same house slept
the women of the evening,
bush-clover, the moon.
The blossoms have gone,
and the moon; he drinks the wine
of his solitude.
Butterfly and bird,
there is your hidden flower —
the sky of autumn.
The snow that we watched
falling then — has it fallen
again with the year?
Upon an ill road,
old among withered fields; dreams
will go wandering still.
Lewis Turco
from The Cream City Review, ix:1-2, 1984, and The Cream City Review 20th
Anniversary Anthology, xx:1-2,
1995-96.
