I. Usui (雨水): A Thin Rain Falls
On the day you were born
A screaming fell across the sky
That still reverberates down deep passages,
(Deep into the wells that speak your name
In syllables formed with drips and drops and great sluicing
Waters
A million years old);
That still resolves on the green buds,
Thrusting out in tiny explosions
From broken ramparts
On the edge of recycled empires,
Into a dew
A malicious dew
Adieu.
II. Shunbun 春分: Vernal, Equinoctial, Primordial
On the day you were born
Petals long-vanished dove headlong into the air
And spread themselves across parks and marble graves
In a pink blanket that
You said
Would never fade;
But it did,
Ginzakura,
-- Unraveling across vistas and basins and vacant lots,
Rattling in the deadened memories
Of impotent men trapped in dusty hallways--
Until the Angel of History, horrified at what It has seen,
Comes to us
And shows that horror
Back to ourselves, like a mirror,
Shining it in our faces
Until we, tentative sun-gods of a lost pantheon,
Pull ourselves out from the cave
And -- revealing our dis
Figured faces --
Bring light
{Maxwell's light}
Back to the world.
III. Rikka (立夏): Rise, Tsuru, Rise!
On the day you were born
We slid our blackened bodies,
Out from dry riverbeds
To gaze on the skins of shriveled persimmons;
But gravity's pull was too strong for us,
(Though you promised
It would let us float away);
And we stared in envy at the
Tsuru
Soaring above us as it
Spiraled around us
Wider and wider
To join a million others spinning,
Circling the worm
Hole
At the epic
Center
That somehow holds them all.
IV. Shōsho (小暑): A Heat Builds
On the day you were born
The moon lit upon our pillows in the open air
And kept us awake with whispers and hints
And threatened to kill the stars with its madness
And sink the paper ships we set adrift
-- Still holding our wishes for the river of heaven--
Until our thoughts abate like a flood leaving
Detritus
-- Broken walls,
Rusted vaults
Smudged daguerreotypes
Of women wrapped in silk --
All about us
And we awake in its absence
To our own
Traps of darkness.
V. Taisho 大暑: The Great Heat Arrives
On the day you were born
The sun sent out its radiance and
Its beauty hurt more
Than if it had been the power of a thousand-million suns
And it said to us:
<Behold! I am become time>
<Behold! I am become death>
But its yellow-caked light faded in the rain
Falling black upon us,
And we
Like cicadas cracked open
Longed for even half our lives,
Half-fulfilled
Weightless husks,
To somehow
Be filled up again
With just a spoonful
Of that light.
VI. Risshū (立秋): The rending of the veil | Autumn breaks open
On the day you were born,
Ginzakura,
A gleam of metal fell across the sky
Like the fruit and fire
Of careless gods
Dropped
[
O
sakura
]
Into mortal laps;
And your glass petals that never die but never live were forged
In five fingers of fire,
And your silver fruit unfolds before us like
Venus
金星
Aloft;
And we long to hold its heaviness in our hands
And we long to lift that heaviness from our hearts
And we long to fold that breathlessness back into our minds
In the season of the
Ginzakura
Silver sakura
Standing scorched in the starlight
Looking out past us
Holding fractaled branches
Upward and outward
At futures without us.