Listening - David Mura

Listening – David mura

And from that village, steaming with mist, riddled with rain,
from the fisherman in the bay hauling up nets of silver flecks;
from the droning of the Buddhist priest in the morning,

incense thickening his voice, a bit other-worldly, almost sickly;
from the oysters ripped from the sea bottom by half-naked women,
their skin darker than the bark in the woods, their lungs

as endless as some cave where a demon dwells
(soon their harvest will be split open by a blade, moist
meaty flesh, drenched in the smell of sea bracken, the tidal winds);

from the torrii[1] halfway up the mountain
and the steps to the temple where the gong shimmers
with echoes of bright metallic sound;

from the waterfall streaming, hovering in the eye, and in illusion, rising;
from the cedars that have nothing to do with time;
from the small mud-cramped streets of rice shops and fish mongers;

from the pebbles on the riverbed, the aquamarine stream
floating pine-trunks, felled upstream
by men with hachimaki2 tied round their forehead

and grunts of o-sha3 I remember from my father in childhood;
from this mythical land of the empty sign and a thousand-thousand
manners,
on the tip of this peninsula, far from Kyoto, the Shogun’s palace,

in a house of shoji4 and clean cut pine, crawling onto a straw futon,
one of my ancestors lay his head as I do now on a woman’s belly
and felt an imperceptible bump like the bow of a boat hitting a swell

and wondered how anything could cause such rocking unbroken
joy.


[1] Gate of a Shinto shrine.
2 Headband.
3 Ruler or monarch.
4 Paper screen.