it’s not an act

scene i.

how cold it is
in sunny San Francisco
when the wind precedes the day.
when the bed is empty
every morning.
when one day
hardly leads to the next.

yet the wind comes out of Fukishima
hot on the ass
of some fool bureaucrat
who just wanted to save face.

my bones ache everyday.
I don’t know which wind causes that.

scene ii.

We can feel sorry for ourselves
or we can feel sorry for the world
there is a false note in each tune
if we don’t go out
to embrace our friends
or to protest and take action.

yet August is taking forever this year
and the time is disappearing.

... lutes and resonances

symptoms
friends
year after year

newspaper headlines
… taken the place
of my writing …
every day…
it’s just the world we live in.

I like these last few poems you've posted, Pete. Though I really don't know what to say about the Japanese.

Les

You know, Les, when I read [past tense] Pound's Cantos out loud to myself the first time I came to treasure the boundaries of my knowledge that he brought me to again and again. He drove me to learn about Italian history [a little], the Provencal language [I took a course at Harvard extension school for that], Chinese and Japanese poetry, Egyptian hieroglyphics [another extension course in the square]...again and again he took me out of the familiar, out of my circle of interests into another field where I learned my limits and learned another lesson in humility in the face of what other people know. I went to a reading by an American poet who is living in Japan the other night and learn more about cordiality [or lack of it], the limits of her poetry and the open-heartedness of the other featured reader.

The transliteration of the Japanese from Harold G. Henderson's An Introduction to Haiku is just a reminder to myself of how little I know again haiku in the original after over forty years of admiring and wrestling with American translations of the stuff.

Thanks for visiting,

Peter