From the series, Japan Poems.
The sign in the window
read Slow Coffee
and when you went inside
and found out the story
of the owner
an artist and former architect
who had a brain stroke
he explained that this was
not Starbucks
he was disabled
and it took him time
to prepare the coffee
it was slow coffee
and when it came out
and I tasted it for the first time
slow coffee became an instant favorite
a strong simple brew
assured of its place
among the bubbling
chaos of the everyday.
From the series, Japan Poems.
Time out
a cemetery plotted on higher ground
overlooking the railroad tracks
crisscrossing bouts of traffic
houses accounting for lives
lived in shuttered flashes
the dead
amounting to subtlest vigils
kept in the way wind
never stays put or silent.
Within the hyphenated seizure
of rain upon stone,
a lyrical wake of kisses
threading sky to the earth-sown–
Images of the floating world
perceive our birth and death,
we go on, surviving our ghosts,
dissolving into unmembered deeds
of light,
flirting endlessly with ephemera
and the unknown.
From the series, Japan Poems.
Rainy Wednesday,
visiting Ryokan’s hut—
No one there, frog jumped.
From the series, Japan Poems.
Stalking fervently inlaid territories
and textures,
ribbed intimacies
scaling soundly an overture
to evolutionary bonds
and leaps—
lizard, fish, man
splashing wildly in pools
jazz forming freely
in the river’s fast-moving mouth—
notes, air, ground
swell of man called Yoshizawa Motoharu
creeping secretly between
intervals of space and time
bass diving heaven
lung deep breaths—
music never dies.
At the elevated cemetery
near the railroad tracks
the silent Buddha
presides unerringly
over the ghosts
faring passage to no known ends.
In the palm of shadows,
at the rounded edge of wake,
vanishing points emerge
to blur and perpetuate
the deeply dreamed course of our longings,
all those ghosts called upon
to fade.
From the series, Japan Poems.
A silent quartet,
facing the mottled reflections
of lives, unrecognized,
emptying into a pool of dreams,
wandering without claim
or respite.
In our petitions
for mercy
repose
is the standard
by which we elicit
the preferred company of grace.
From the series, Japan Poems.
Time alone
leaves us small
cherished pleasures
through which our lives
are gathered slowly
in moments
of favored ephemera.
