Excerpts from Grace Notes, by Ken Rodgers

WORDS

For Yuri, 1983

The universal love-poem
has no words

By the window
a deep and full cup drinks:
technicolor red and yellow tulip 
turning to the light

Living clay 
on the sun's wheel

SHAKKEI, AT ENTSU-JI

The garden is empty; an airy room without walls.

The view across the valley to Hiei-zan is invited in
like a friend, to share a deep bowl of green tea— 
this leisurely moss ocean lapping the cliff-stones
and azalea-islands, 
cupped by a clipped camellia hedge 
and breeze-stirred maples.

Viewed from Entsu-ji’s fresh tatami 
veranda posts match spaced cryptomerias
dividing the garden vista like a folding screen.

A living painting of Nirvana, or Amitabha’s Pure Land? 
No. Simply the natural world, experienced as shakkei— 
borrowed landscape.

Borrowed mountain slopes traversed by borrowed light
and shadow; borrowed clouds traversing borrowed sky. 
Birds traverse the view, lending their voices; a crow 
echoes the staccato beat of a carpenter’s hammer.

Each present moment is loaned, just for the time being. 
We borrow time like air, like sun, like water;
and everything is revealed as changing—refreshed, 
regenerated, millisecond by millisecond.

The Buddha’s world of constant transience. 
Worth framing. Priceless.

PRUNING A PINE TREE

My fine sophistry linking gardening and editing, particularly the metaphor of pruning, does not persuade the pine tree by our front door, overlooking the rice field. It submits—with clear reservations—to stripping out the clustered dry needles that thicket its upper reaches, but draws the line at arbitrary deletions. Right—who am I to unilaterally decide the shape of a mature pine?

Yuri meanwhile insists on closely trimming my straggly graying mustache and beard.
Being Japanese, she’s embarrassed that I look like I don’t care how others see me.
Being Australian, of course, I’m embarrassed to look like I care at all about my appearance.

My dapperly refined new look, as I ascend the ladder and haul myself into its topmost branches, certainly doesn’t impress the pine, which makes no secret of aspiring to absolute dragonhood.

SPRING 2011, ARASHIYAMA

Capture this
—self-regenerating brocade
Nihonga-delicate fresh bud, leaf, petal, 
cascading over Mt Ogura's shoulder 
perfuming farmer Zen's breeze…
—in a single haiku? 
No way.

Cue the uguisu. 

“Hō-hoke-kyo” 

OK, got it.

Just one line
and the silence, before and after.

[Uguisu: bush warbler, “spring-announcing bird” or “sutra-reading bird”—said to quote the Lotus Sutra,saying“Hō-hoke-kyo”;Zen,a farmer-poet friend of haikuist Stephen Gill, is or was caretaker of the big field next to Rakushisha, the hut of fallen persimmons, Bashō’s temporary abode]


MAPLE-VIEWING AT KOETSUJI, NOV. 2021

If I were a poet, perhaps
I’d be a cosmologist of the heart; 
maker of maps mountain-silhouetted 
along all four sides, a conjurer of odes 
imbued with autumn’s breathlessness, 
the small-talk of endless streams,
birdcalls embroidered into maple brocade.

But what can I say? Each new day 
is a different season.

Beyond this sudden blood-red overkill 
of dazzling impermanence
cool afternoon sky 
whispers one word:

infinity.