My House Guest Basho
Working on a couple new essays, in the meanwhile here's a previously published poem, one of my favorites. Enjoy!
“Let your house fall,” Basho says, your followers will build a new one.” I don’t have followers, I say, only an HOA. Basho grumbles and shakes his sunflower sutra in my direction. Basho arrives on the first day of May, from a book I wanted to leave for winter but his journey to the Deep North called from its pages and I read It in the early year sun. He delayed his journey to drink all my sake and berate my lack of summer writing. But the sun is too hot and weeds grow faster than words. Today Basho is face first in the sages looking for the rabbit he chased there to ask its name. The bees don’t mind, ghost of my mind that he is. Their droning calms us both. “Leave the rabbit be,” I say. “He must rest before a night pursuing the moon.” Basho straightens, grins claps his hands once like Zen thunder. “Good haiku for summer!” He yells, and I sigh for even my admonishments are poems when faced with Zen synchronicity and Basho’s haiku mind. Later, during high noon heat we are inside, I at my desk and he sitting in the leather chair, eyes speaking without words at me as I stare at my still pencil. “Only eternity,” he says and sets down his sake cup, the pink kimono’d woman painted on the side folding a paper crane, my wish for summer words. Autumn, and Basho continues to the Deep North, the basket on his back filled with books and sunflowers. We bow in my driveway on a carpet of fallen locust leaves. Basho hands me a sake barrel, rush-wrapped, and in my hand the wine sloshes like sleet and the dry rushes crack like winter wind bringing me words, finally.
This is such a beautiful poem. I love it!