Inscription, and: Soseki’s Shrine

Inscription

and the roots of the fallen oak tree rearin flamboyant Gothic lozenges: earth soggedfrom days of rain so ghost pipes spring up,crooking their croziers, spectral parasites.I borrow from them all, sometimes I thinkI’m a plant, pale and mycohetero-trophic. “This is a novelabout time,” the learned author declared.Yes, the Book of Life whose pagesturn slowly yet so swiftly in thisdiseased, reclusive year, damp sheetsof shale underfoot and the shuddering silver flashof beech leaves above. Hardly has the snowmelted than the catalpa’s white torchesextinguish and summer starts slidinginto its oubliette. As the black bearglides so suddenly into the meadow, we neverhear his approach: in a blinkhe’s here, all presence, a silhouettetall on his hind legs, smacking applesfrom the lower boughs. When he turns,he shows his Roman snout, his propheticbrow, his thoughtful, considering eyes.Like a shadow he springs up the trunk, almostinvisible in the shivering green: he’s there,chomping wild apples, it’s his season,it’s their season: let me give awaywhat I fear, other solstices will roll around:in childhood I slept in a high room fringedby dark-sleeved spruces, a tree house in which I learned a grammar of shadows. That houseis gone, the towering spruces are cut: I hearthe bear munching, the branches shake, it’s hardto distinguish his blackness from the tree’s owninward night. And that larger night I shall be,oh yes, getting to know.

Soseki’s Shrine

The mother bear stands on her hind legs to bathard green apples from the boughs, while two cubsslide up the trunk as if black water should flowupward and disappear into shuddering leaves.The third cub rummages for fruit in tall grass.The apples are tiny and sour. The bearsare hungry, working hard. The whole meadowstrives, shakes with striving, as crickets thrumand dragonflies slice the air and overheadthe peregrine falcon floats its high, staccato cry.My fingers are stained with ink. In Kyoto,in Soseki’s ancient temple, the stone basin for mixing inkstands upright, a shrine to writing. At its basewater in a trough. A dipper. One dips, one pourswater over one’s hands. One prays to writepurely. How hard, when we want so much.We’re hungry, we want to leave our names.“Scholar’s hands,” the exiled researcher told me,holding my hands in hers. “Calluses.Ink stains. Rough cuticles. Hands that work.”She’s dead now. Musō Soseki’s pondhas lasted for seven hundred years.