From “One Hundred poems From The Japanese”

I have always known

That at last I would

Take this Road, but yesterday

I did not know that it would be today

.

NARIHIRA

Tsui ni yuko

Michi to wa kanete

Kikishi kado

Kino kyo to wa

Omowazarishi wa

A NEW POET (by Linda Pastan

A New Poet

Linda Pastan

Finding a new poet
is like finding a new wildflower
out in the woods. You don’t see

its name in the flower books, and
nobody you tell believes
in its odd color or the way

its leaves grow in splayed rows
down the whole length of the page. In fact
the very page smells of spilled

red wine and the mustiness of the sea
on a foggy day – the odor of truth
and of lying.

And the words are so familiar,
so strangely new, words
you almost wrote yourself, if only

in your dreams there had been a pencil
or a pen or even a paintbrush,
if only there had been a flower.

Flash Session

All Paul Simon sang  he

Via telephone headphones  to me

“..half of the time  you’re gone..

but you don’t know where

you don’t know where.”

i  wept  at  work.

.

Yet i got Simic  in his lunch sack/

I got Irish for when i get home

For salve & for saving him/

More, I have a mate giving me gladness

Across  the  state

I love indirectly  like madness

AND AN ADDLED, SAD MAN SAID

It’s unsafe for you too

Assume  We’re leaning

Into Leaving

(an intangible caress)

I lean into

The careening custody  of my mess.

F A I L U R E

A peripheral-visionary

Somehow stepped in cow poop.

Then  a man-on-a-missionary

Also Failed to see all  his true path

Also Failed to seek wholey  his newest  breath

Tho’ he hovers over roses,

Forever forgetting  lettting  out  as tho’

Fire candles require no

Repose