Kimiko Hahn - The narrow road to the interior: poems

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for Miyako

to leaf through many years from now

By nightfall, we come to Ska, bony shoulders sore from heavy pack, grateful for a warm night robe, cotton bathing gown, writing brush, ink stone, necessities. The pack made heavier by farewell gifts from friends. I couldnt leave them behind.

MATSUO BASH, The Narrow Road to the Interior

translated by Sam Hamill

Dear L

You asked for a little compass. Thank you!

I was looking for a definition of the zuihitsu from my shelf of Japanese texts, but discovered none gave more than a sentence or two. None seemed especially scholarlywhich might be a good thing. None offered the sense of disorder that feels so integral. Here is what I did find:

[L]iterally, following [the impulses of] the brush, and consisting of brief essays on random topics

Donald Keene, Seeds in the Heart

[Miscellany]... partly of reminiscences, partly of entries in diary-form

Arthur Waley, The Pillow Book

[S]tray notes, expressing random thoughts in a casual manner

Makoto Ueda, Principles of Classical
Japanese Literature, Earl Miner, ed.

Notice that none conveys the tonal insistence a writer finds her/himself in. None suggests an organizing principlewhat we might call a theme. None comments on structural varietylist, diary, commentary, essay, poem. Fragment.

None offers that a sense of disorder might be artfully ordered by fragmenting, juxtaposing, contradicting, varying length oreven within a piecetopic.

From Mother seated at a window, winding her hair into a french-twistto me, seated in a glass-bottom boat in a Tennessee cavern. Wellpoor example.

Varietye-mail, say. Gossip or scholarly annotation.

None states that these essays are closer to poetryin my mind.

That Saturns rings might be fadingjuxtaposed with a hula hoop. A hoop skirt. A pierced clitoris. Okayfor me, that the zuihitsu feels encompassing. That a fragment might be synecdoche, or excerpt. Or scrap. (Sappho comes to mind.) Why not!

(And when is a piece that resembles a fragmentreally the whole?)

What do you think?

YoursK

Houston

August, 2005

Dep. 10:07 a.m. to N.Y. Penn Station

In the cavernous station, the train delayed for over an hour, I have watched a woman tend her newborn. She is tall, ties her hair back, has light dark skin and light, maybe green, eyes. Her baby is lighter; the man who picked up the ticket and kissed them, very black. I have watched her because her baby is so quiet. And I have not heard her voice.

On the train she sits one seat ahead and across the aisle. When the train brakes in Albany, the baby cries ahh! And she replies ahh! And I think, just what I would do, then feel miserable. Was I ever so attentive?

Placing one or the other child in the stroller, on the changing table, in a sassy seat, in the sandbox surrounded by plastic starfish and seahorses?

Stay. Come back.

She cradles the child, a boy by the blue; her rocking, syncopated with the trains chugging. Rain flecks the gray window. We pass a ditch of one hundred tires. A muddy lot of containers. Trees like sticks. A stray willow. We pass by the buds with such speed it could be late winter.

My heart is swollen, large as a newborn.

I do not want to return to their infancies. I would merely do the same: want to be in this notebook, not on the carpet covered with dolls. To be at the window waiting for their father, not swinging them in the park.

That was my motherin the sandbox.

The farther south, the greener. Is it my imaginationor the proximity to the river?

I see a couple on a tiny jetty, holding a pink blanket.

My heart is swollen. As if a gland, not a muscle.

But I am wrong. There were stories Id read and reread. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. The Runaway Bunny. Ping, the Duck. If I read a big word, Id explain as if the explanation were part of the narrative: private, ones very own; escape, get away.

There were evenings where we ate a picnic dinner on the Columbia lawns while their father worked late. I remember because when a plane roared over us, Id say plane plane and she would look up to watch it roar away.

One of my first tasks was to name things. Then it became her task. One daughters then the next. Wed walk from apartment to park Pizza. Doggie. Firetruck.naming thingsDaisy.

Train. Bus. Car.

It is so difficult to travel with an infantthe bags of plastic things. Ones own pockets, weighted with keys and change. Maybe a magazine stuck in somewhere. Balancing a cup of coffee with one hand, steering the stroller with the other. The baby struggling to be held. Difficult pleasures.

Writing time, remote.

I told myself then, I need to slow downas if picking lice off a childs head. As if reading a poeminstead of sniffing around for the self on some meridian.

Along this train ride down the Hudson, the tracks run so close to the water it is as if the water were the rails.

I wonder if there is clay along the rivers edgejust as Barbara and I found clay in the brook behind her house. Or as my daughters dug into the sand for the red clay on Fire Island, our hands afterward, cinnabar-red.

Always, Mommy needs toI need to

I look up from this notebook and see a tiny island with the shell of a castlewhat is that? Is that how Ive been a mother?

Dogwood blossoms, a cloud in the grove of branches.

A sailboat. A rowboat.

The mother and infant sleep now, the boy like a cat on her chest. Or as if her heart rested on the outside of her chest. I do recall that lovely pressure.

As we near the GWB, a tugboat towing a barge. Part of the bridge is wrapped in cloth. As if chilled.

I wish we didnt have to plunge into a tunnel.

Now forsythia. Now weeping cherry. I think of my motherdead these past seven yearseight by Buddhist count.

The sudden brick landscape of Harlem. Then the tunnel, so now I see reflected in the window the boy who has been banging the seat, as if a sport. I need water to swallow an aspirin. I need to stretch.

My heart is swollen, as ifa hot water bottle!

The mother pats the baby. She begins to collect jackets for them both.

To put on an infants jacket, Id curl my own hand through the cuff and up the sleeve then pull her arm through. A tiny trick.

There was a difficult moment on a city bus: when I finally got the baby to stop stamping on the seat and sit down, the passenger behind me leaned forward and said, Youre a good mother. I nearly wept.

Stay. Come back.

A mother with a fishing rod.

Looking for sensation on some meridian. In some station. Now speeding away from an acquaintance I might have asked, shall I slip off my dress? But I didnt. There was no urgency.

A mother with a plastic kite.

This is the difference: I dont find myself trailing a man around a room, screening gesture and tone.

This is the difference: I thought I was missing. Missing something.

As if a party balloon.

If my short hair didnt get so crushed Id wear a baseball cap, too. (What would it say?)