Blackbird Feature, Margaret Gibson, June 14, 2002

I'm going to read four poems that have been inspired by Japanese art in the Metropolitan Museum of Arts collection. I ran across these pieces, actually all collected for me, in the Art and Engagement book that the Metropolitan produced in 2001 that was edited by Barbara Ford. Using this book for a year, and meditating a bit on many of the pieces in there, I ended up with a book-length manuscript of poems, which is going to be called Autumn Grasses and will be published in 2003 by Louisiana State University Press.

The first two poems in the four that I am going to read are "persona" poems. The speaker in the first poem, "Next Morning Letter," is a young woman dressed in a magnificent kimono with magnolias all over it and clematis blossoms, and the poem brings to life the old tradition in ancient Japan of sending a next morning letter to the lover youve just left, from whose bed youve just crept at dawn.

Savoring each summer moment lush and brief I close my eyes to see

your white robe, falling open

as you call for your scroll and ink stone, a brush As your brush passes over the paper

my body shivers

How closely now you watch at the open lattice as your servant hurries away

the next morning letter

gracefully tied to a spray of clematis whose blossoms will not open

until they reach me

In the washbasin your face is the bridge that spans

the floating world of dreams

Now you are yawning Now you are reciting sutras bowing to the wind

When the letter arrives

all the leaves of the maple outside my window are stirred

I read your words

just once, then once again bringing my fingers to my lips, my hair

On the dawn's trellis the scent of clematis Now smell your fingers The petals of my body gather in your empty arms

How shall I respond? The cry of the stag is so loud

the echo answers

from the empty mountains as if it were a doe I tell you only what you know

Clematis—the scent of your teaching surrounds me My empty arms fill Come night, the fragrant petals fall in a heap at my feet

This was based on a hanging scroll that was painted by Kaigetsudo Doshin [ Beauty Writing a Letter ].

The next poem is called "Drifting Boat," and it's spoken by a character in The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu. Her name was Ukifune and she was kept in an isolated house where she was the lover of one prince and became through a kind of hoax the lover of another man, and it was a very complicated story and Ill refer you to Murasaki. This is just a moment. This one is based on an album leaf that was done in ink and color with gold on paper in the Edo period.

During the banquet what poem can I say for him as the wine cup comes floating by on the winding waters? I am not stone

in the garden, nor an oak, nor a stalwart line of night-mooring rocks Not a ship held at anchor nor the treasure sought at sea

I am what it means to wander— Ukifune a boat long adrift in the sound of dark water Outside the house at Uji

where I have been put I hear rain swept hills calling and the cry of deer the rush of water falling and the slow tolling of a bell

Who is it that hears? So smoothly, so smoothly glides my boat, that were I to merge with the winter sea would there be any ripple?

Snow falls on cedars Snow melts from the bough also Who is it that hears the torrential ebb and flow in the heart? In wine? In snow?

The speaker of this poem, "Summer Birds and Flowers," is just someone looking at a scroll by Shikibu Terutada from the sixteenth century. Its called "Summer Birds and Flowers."

Unrolling the coiled scroll

enacts the momentary

sweeping down the midday sky of small birds

on a draft from the distant blue ravines

and mountain ridges

into the windy clearing of summer's

middle distance, so luminous and near

it's hard to see

elegantly disguised by graceful hollyhocks

and stalks of amber iris that steeply

lean into the emptiness

that borders the tended garden path

Any fear of what imperils and impends

is tempered—

so that the tidal and jagged line of the far mountains

seems merely an artful mapping of the birds'

arc of flight

And such a glimmer of gaiety as they dip and swoop with unguarded ease into the inseparable

immensity

my heart stops now as I think of it

The last poem is called "Foxfire at the Changing Tree." There's a lot of folklore about foxes in Japan, and they are wily critters indeed. And rather than being worshipped at shrines as some people think, people go to shrines to offer offerings to foxes so that theyll stay away from them and not bother them. In the New Year, the foxes take on the stolen forms of pious pilgrims and go to the shrines themselves.

This is based on Ando Hiroshige's drawing of this event called Foxfire at the Changing Tree on New Years Eve and the poem's simply called "Foxfire at the Changing Tree."

The burning that must have been coming from me— these are lines I'm stealing from someone else's poem, just after I've resolved not to lie, not to steal to live in my evergreen integrity as long as I can manage it I'm much like these foxes gathered on a night whose stars might be flakes of snow They have their burning torches to lift and bear down the road, fully camouflaged once they've put on the stolen forms of pious pilgrims The bare, spreading tree above them is fit for owls to inhabit when a savory hunger makes them take deadly aim on any small rustle in the dry leaves That's their true nature however haunting their melancholy cries But the foxes—for the love of me (and it's exactly that) I can't see why I shouldn't want to touch them, stroke them I might just rub the ruddy silk of their coats against my cheek And often have, you tell me bluntly That friction, however slight, sufficient to make me spit fire, gnash my teeth and lunge for the soft parts of your body lifting my chin moments after to say hotly, I didn't mean to I didn't see it coming

As if I were the innocent one blindsided, bloodied