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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets Far Travels ADRIAN OKTENBERG _______________________ Seed I can't look at all at these green hills without thinking of him, waiting in stillness for the scrawny winter dawn, or look at the colors, gorgeous and decayed, of leaves heaped upon each other, or catch the flash of red winged blackbirds scudding in weeds, or feel the presence of a stand of birches in snow at twilight, or watch the slow danse macabre of the seasons, its turning, returning, rebirth, without thinking of one who went to fetch water for tea and sat under a pine, watching the moon so long his guest had to go and find him. For Bashō, who first trudged the road that led to the north, who said his art was a furnace in summer and a fan in winter, he was the poet, the survivor of solitary winter who carried kernels against the hope of spring, and in him the hymn-singer seeking grace humbly sings. [397]
Rock In Japan three hundred years ago Bashō spoke of the diffident snow over the hills of the far north, where quail, I think, used to wander and boys in groups went forth to track them. His voice carries across the hills at night, but there are no quail left there any more, to track the snow, or call across the hills to the boys in their camaraderie. The snow itself melts into the streams in spring. The rock, broken or dislodged, remains. His voice, even at moments when the brief spring touches it with warmth, retains an echo of men and nature locked in love and struggle, and therein its power, and therefore, its grief. [398]
Stream When Bashō reached the Shirakawa gate, opening to the northern regions, the countryside was covered white with thousands of flowers or early snow. Neither priest nor man of the world was he, but something in between, doubtfully wavering the inland sea between the bright and dark islands of night and day. In a garden there, he heard the mournful thock and plash of a bamboo cistern in the stream, filling up and spilling over, tipping its water onto stone. The stone became as ridged and smooth as vulva and vagina. In the midst of hauling hay to the barn, aching with fatigue, I sat down on a bale and thought of it. That was years ago, and in Vermont, where the short summer peels away in fall. [399]
Beach The ancient Manyōshū poets and those who sang in Provençal bid you taste this morsel, fish, lemon scented, or that silken almond, as you wish, and beckon you hear the plucked music of koto and lute, and gather together on some beach where an ocean brushes the cool sand in pale lights when the dawn rises. We cannot think without language, and this too is part of our world, the music which eases us through night and cold, and through which we express the pathos of lips on lips. Come, Bashō. Eat. Sing. [400]
Catastrophe Theory - for Barbara Herrnstem Smith This morning, frost clung to everything: wrinkled apples still hanging on a bare branched tree, field, broken with stalks, blades of grass, silver where sunlight glints off them. Smeared white mountains in the distance, women's shapes, lying in soft light. Yet it is warm. A woman walks the field with her dog, wondering at the earth, its slow curving fall from morning to night, its birth and death, invisible, indivisible from life, from its own recent summer and its fruit, from her changing body and her scarf. Last summer, she sat with a friend by a Southern stream, mourning, talking of children, forests, the polar ice caps, warming, fires, birds and fish giving warning. Catastrophe theory-the idea that accidents can occur in such a way they create new means and forms, something like pearls- may regain life for the earth, another billion years of insects and fish, small species, trees. She walks the field, head down, as if searching. The dog thrusts its nose into frost white leaves. [401]
Lament, After Liu Yung Late autumn rains have given the garden a terrible hangover. Chrysanthemums stand withered near the door, in the beds the vegetables are reduced to stalks. I watch the bay. When Liu Yung suffered, she came here to watch the water and wander the back roads which all stop at the cliffs. She stayed in this empty house until the cold winds came, fogs over the waters, crickets chattering back and forth, enough to drive anyone mad. Change comes glacially. The night brings the Milky Way and the moon, transparent as the memory of silk on her breasts. Thought follows thought, night after night, the years wound me. I squandered years hanging around the city. Oh, the city was fine! Eating all night, drinking all day, young women kissing and toasting each other, lingering near the music until late, then pairing off. Those days! Since then, time's clacked by like a shuttle. Hidden here in the mists, I'll go on. [402]
The House Weak afternoon light leans on the house opposite, shutters change from black to green. It's not a change of season, but the season deepens and becomes more itself. January. I know this house as a person, it too has received letters, been loved and then unloved. The frames of the windows, gray as the winter Atlantic, have been telling me they know something about emptiness. When I entered my steps rang in the rooms with a sharp report. On the floor were scattered: a ball of string, cans of paint, plumb line chalk, milky blue. I felt like plunging my whole hand in paint and pressing my palm high on the wall, fingers spread, to mark my presence as they once did in the ancient caves, one handprint red, one in black. A few charging horses. After I leave, the rooms murmur again. The lilacs by the walk stand watch near the entrance after light fades from the porch. [403]
Adrian Oktenberg was born in Oakland, California in 1947. She has published two collections of poetry, Swimming with Dolphins (Bucknell University Press, 2002) and The Bosnia Elegies (Paris Press, 1997), and a chapbook, Drawing in the Dirt (Malachite & Agate, 1997). Her poetry has appeared in The American Voice, Nimrod, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, The Kenyon Review, and The Women's Review of Books. Oktenberg was a real estate lawyer in New Jersey. Now retired from the practice of law, she lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. "Lament, After Liu Yung" was first published in Prairie Schooner; "Seed," "Rock," "Stream," and "Beach" in Nimrod. All the poems here were collected in Adrian Oktenberg's Swimming with Dolphins (Bucknell University Press, 2002). |
