Roo Borson

…

I followed the path into the woods, and just as my friend described, it led across the old railway bridge. The water beneath the bridge was wide and deep and not particularly clear. It seemed to swell as it flowed, as if pushing something unseen downriver. Indeed a large dredging barge was planed in the midst of the river, doing its unseen work. At one point along the right-hand side of the bridge was a bronze plaque, along with three poems and some plastic flowers tacked to the wooden railing. A boy had jumped to his death here some time ago it seemed, and the poems – one by his parents – were there not only to mark the loss, but also as a means of speaking with him directly. The poems, expressed in commonplaces, were not fine art, but they were communication. They were the sort of poems that say what they mean. Amazingly, almost superstitiously, people still fall back on writing poetry when they feel they have something truly important to communicate.

…

I understand the parents’ wish, despite everything, to speak to their son, though if it were up to me I’d take the poems and flowers down. Yet I too would like to place a poem on the bridge for those who’ve gone under, as well as those of us who’ve stayed above.

On the last night of the year

the swans set sail at evening.

Then among the boats and fireworks

we can see the black water,

the city in the river.

That’s where all our life is,

beyond the grief and failure,

the wake among the reeds.

Down there

down there

what is that place now

but a hill studded with lights

and a pine tree that doesn’t move with the wind?

Wherever there is summer,

wherever the crickets sing to it,

that place is.

But longing is a wind that blows through you,

and like the pine that is nowhere

you do not move.

As for you, world –

you’ll have become small, and round, and lavender-coloured: ode

to the ewer, the comb, the water cooler.

And you? You lived in a place which was once a town,

you’ve seen it on maps before, others loaded ships

as in a dream: mood, appetite, memory, learning –

the demands seemed endless, all marsh-lights and loveliness,

the final estimates for the real world

or these propositions, for instance, which are sometimes true.

Indeed such unconscious concentration is possible,

in the neon light of early spring

and later, those evenings no longer fully spring

yet not quite summer either,

when the scent pulls back into the flower

and blackbirds bathe among violets,

half aspect, half unreal, in the slow rain of leaves.

Day after day, some days not returning,

and the boughs painted with light green lichen,

the detailed pink of the flowering apricot –

don’t go there unless to banish yourself,

because you are banished, beech,

oak, birch, and yew, among the hazel woods

of the elder world, where feathers flash

among the branches and hide in the darkening varnish

and history becomes the history of bad ideas,

a gloom of rotten nuts and nut-skins,

bitter paper. And tonight

the half-light in which paper glows –

walls, porticos, arches, places (who lived there?),

the print invisible, and the ocean sounding

all night long, clavicle to vena cava,

clavicle to vena cava,

it’s not a description.

All along the summer river,
this confused heart —
wild anise and pine.
It’s not a place for rest,
and not for meditation —
It’s a place of endless daydreams,
something flowing underneath reflections on the water.

If you come down to the summer river,
what is it you’ll eat? Clouds, ducks —
reflections of ducks, wild anise and pine.
The river will eat you or spit you out.
Now: not looking at the river, what are you?

Whatever people say I can’t remember.
Trying to get it right I stumble on.
“O cadets of river-shadow —”
and the words arrive.
All night the words arrive like horses, horses
that are gone, and then it’s morning.

Only weeks ago, two of them.
Two stilt-birds, each standing on one leg side by side.
Now, day after day, just one of them comes to stand by the river
and at night returns to the nearby sports-field
to stand alone until dawn.
Is it his loneliness
I feel, or my own?

Now if I come close,
he hobbles away.
Trying to keep him company,
I force him from the shade.
Grown boys tussle, toss balls around,
they’re in college.
He stands at the edge of the world
and waits — or not — for his “friend” to return.

In the morning I wake and find that pity in myself again,
every day dream of this or that.
That’s what the river’s good for:
flowing, taking away.

The miner birds get to harry the magpies.
The magpies close in around the rattletrap doves.
The rattletrap doves run away from footsteps.
The footsteps come to the ginger flowers and stop,
but the ginger flowers don’t notice.

So here they are,
in the joints of bamboo:
the poems I meant to write.

— A type of banana tree
that shares Basho’s name:
its trunk a dull bronze mirror
filled with water long ago.

It’s not a place of daydream,
and not for meditation.
For the crane and the cormorant
it’s a place to catch fish.
Try to meditate here
and you’ll soon be carried off.
The river has no breath in it but it ripples.

Almost afternoon,
and the ducks still sleeping.
Late in the summer
the river closes over.
Dragonflies, leaves
drift all one way —
all leaves, no reflections.

Friends talk about “empathy,”
and I talk back.
We keep drinking, the conversation veers off.
Awake, alone, I lie awake.
All night the argument continues.

The bay tree smells of my old home,
or is it just a past that’s truly past?
The moon is a rock that doesn’t move.
The egret, only whiteness
rippling on the water.
Give me another world —
one made of grass,
cicadas,
the crying in the grass.

A bug flies past. Flies past,
and I understand
what it is to be born.
Next life, I’ll love you again —

The daydream river,
smell of sunwarmed pine.
Talking to myself again —
why wouldn’t I tell the truth?
What I dreamed of
a moment ago.
For a moment,
when I thought I had no other life.