whose names I'll never have time to learn
do what they were born to do .
They burn, that is . Expand and burn .
Me, too, love-thinking of You,
waiting for sleep, singing this song.
How beautiful breaks the burdened hour! And wrong.
Martha Hollander
OGATA KORIN ON HIS FIELD OF IRISES
Neither you nor I would imagine gardens
like this , but my tacit brush
sees differently. On the
folding screen that will invent a fresh young room
with the stern economy
of a knife , there arises
a company of irises and sweeping
blades of leaf. They explode from
gold ground (not earth but ether,
that sumptuous nothingness which the flat world
so disrupts) as if growing
miraculously from sand.
Descending in a skittish diagonal
they stumble a bit, but then
it's you who must be stumbling
in this burning gold envelope of summer.
Your head lolls along with the
plushy tip of each flower
as if you had laced their scent with your
sake.
Now we both know they might be
calligraphy after all ,
delicious ideograms in just two styles
of purple, and the poem
encoded in their nodding
petals will speak no louder than a whisper.
Kyoto, c. 1701
