EQUINOCTURNE

EQUINOCTURNE Had I not stopped attempting poetry 40 years ago, I might have done better with these musings, but please be tolerant. They are, at least, reasonably iambic. EQUINOCTURNE Coquettish Spring, elusive, virginal Brushes the chill of March with wisps of warmth, While brother Winter's valedictory Breaths, the harukaze, sternly greet Plum blossoms and incautious daffodils. The days grow longer, and with now in sight The Equinox of spring, the Light and Dark In perfect balance, even-handedly, The Yin and Yang co-equal, as we're told In all phenomena they tend to be, Blind to this equanimity though we are. Depending on the region you call home, It may not seem the earth is heating up; The melting glaciers paradoxically Provoke the startling blizzards unforeseen. Has nature's balance truly been upset-- "Koyannisqatsi" as the Hopis say-- Or do the new locales for droughts and floods Bespeak a larger kind of harmony Indifferent to our fleeting destiny? Whatever on the planetary scale May balance out, I can't avoid the thought That in the weather of the human heart A new ice age approaches, even where The temperatures are highest and, in thrall To atavistic ideologies, Men drive compassion from their freezing hearts And sink to medieval cruelty. The poet Robert Frost may be the one Who said it best: "Some say the world Will end in fire; some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great, and would suffice." We may not hold apocalyptic views, Nor eagerly or nervously await The end of days, but harder to deny Is something I am tempted to describe As Thanatotropism, or at least A fashion for acceptance of decline In standards of the bodies politic And spiritual alike -- for which I see No antidote but Auden's "affirming flame".

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In my first few years in Japan, I spent most of the time apart from in the winters, travelling the length and breadth of the country by motorcycle, living in a tent in the forests, taking photographs and writing poetry.  My girlfriend at the time was Fukiko Hayamizu, who translated them for me  and did the Japanese calligraphy for the poems collected below.  Her translations were so good and idiomatic that many Japanese assumed they were the originals and that the English versions were translations of them, whereas the reverse was of course the case.

Charge It To My Valentine Card

Some years ago (around 1990, in fact), when I was editor of the Tokyo PC Users Club magazine, I wrote this poem for the February Issue.  I suppose I might be sued someday for copying the Look and Feel of "Let's Get Away from It All"...

THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR

My daughter recently passed on to me from my sister a copy of the literary magazine I edited at the college I attended when I went to England at the age of 18, containing a poem I had forgotten, that I wrote under the influence of Archibald Macleish's poem "You, Andrew Marvell". You might find it amusingly pessimistic, but I think it not bad for an adolescent stab at historical Weltschmerz:

THE SNOWS OF YESTERYEAR

The force that wraps in ice the outworn fall
Drives ever west a shadow on the land,
Muffles the early murmur round the Sphinx,
Urges the quiet crawl of artless moss
Into the Parthenon.
With dust it fills the wheel ruts, dries the blood
Within the Coliseum, snaps the head
From unlamented Juno, scars with weeds
The drooping Palatine.

THe triremes rot in fifty sunless fathoms
Of the Aegean. The cross of Christ
Has joined as feeble smoke Jerusalem's skies.
Raphael's brush, Michelangelo's chisel
Are ash and dust beneath your halting feet,
Yourself a ghost grown old.

Look there behind you. The shadow nears.
Your thought, your art fall slowly by your grave;
The grandson cannot see them through the night.

Paleopoetics

Another poem I recently uncovered from my writings in my late teens. By this time I was a convinced agnostic (oxymoron?), and, judging from the content of this poem, influenced by W.H. Auden's masterpiece "Musee des Beaux Arts"

ON A CRUCIFIXION EVENING

On a crucifixion evening
come drift with me,
expecting every moment a cataclysmic roar
as the veil of the temple is rent in twain,
awaiting terror on each symbolic face
as the saints arise that have slept.

But in the meantime
come over here and watch
this dog die whining in the Via Dolorosa.
The last man home to supper from the darkening hill
(weeping for the shadows in the soul of Man
and the Pilate in himself) kicked in his rage
too hard the outlined ribs, which broken now
glide unacknowledged through his prophet dreams
and welcome him with laughter to the destined throng.

Look now behind you--
far beyond Calvary,
untouched by thorns, that sliver of moon
drops behind palms that fringe a silver pool,
and the nightingale sleeps in echoes of song.

Nothing much happening
in Jerusalem tonight.
My apologies; I was led to expect...
Well, let us go home. It's disappointing to hear
no tumult in temple or graveyard, to know
the cats of the fountain will scratch for garbage
though lions await their martyred meals.

I suppose you realise
what this means?
The leaves that shade the courtyard of Joan's flames
will grow despite her burning. Blossoms there
will welcome spring without remorse,
though we be images of a god.

In view of this
let us alter our report
about tonight, and continue to shape
impassive Nature partner to our dustborn tears,
recounting each disaster in that human key
that makes it more important than the loneliness
in the arid searching eye of the last mastodon.

But you know, somehow
I can't help feeling
the sun was blazing when Adam fell,
and that his hasty departure by the eastern gates
caused little consternation in the garden.

-CMC-

Blind Man

I recently came across a few poems I wrote ages ago, when I was about 19. Somehow I still like them, despite the fact that the influence of Dylan Thomas is overwhelmingly obvious. Here's one of them, which makes much of the insight common in Thomas's work that the end of things is implicit in their beginning.

BLIND MAN

This was my apocalypse,
The sharp light cracking on the eastern front
No more, the black dew frozen to my eyes,
Cut down my stature of senses.
Dark of my mother and the coffin womb
Flood again with crushing of the light.
.
In my dust-limbed anger of rough eclipse,
Marooned on four senses I dying hunt
The slipping Phoenix in his blazing lies;
I mold this terror to the first defenses,
The barrier circling this burrow tomb,
Caught in the budding flesh a hollow night.
.
And now below the sliding of the seas
I hear the soft dark mourning of the whale,
The moan of foaming salmon streaking home to die,
The curving dolphin in its grief.
The diving rain pins laughter to the oak --
I hear it choking in the summer's fist.
.
I feel the fury in the acorn freeze,
And under searing sun the rushing hail;
I breathe the scent of dying roses in July
And taste the bitter dew that drowns the morning leaf.
The autumn snaps again the stem that Eden broke,
And yearly shrouds the child the first moon kissed.
.
-C.M.C.-