Going forwards

I suppose I’ll keep posting poems/little considerations to this blog now that I’ve finished Kochan. This stanza from Mark Strand has been rattling around my mind of late: “I think of the shining cheeks, the serious palettes Of my friends, and I am sure I am not of their company. There was a time when I touched by the pallor of truth, When the fatal steps I took seemed more like the drift Of summer crossed at times by the scented music of rain, But that was before I was waved to the side By the officer on duty, and told that henceforth I would have to invent my pleasure, carve it out of the air, Subtract it from my future“

Kochan #14 (Credits)

Designed & Printed by Allen Hoey during January 1984. Text is Baskerville on Mulberry rice paper. Of 300 numbered copies, the first fifty, signed by the poet, are bound in boards by Gene Eckert; the remaining copies are sewn into wrappers of Manilla [sic] hemp handmade by Alice Wand. Twenty-six ad personam copies, also signed & bound in boards, are lettered A to Z. This is copy: 31 *Jack Gilbert*

Kochan #13

The Children’s Hour We let the soul peek out and it pretends that snow flies softly at the earth. Makes up Katsura and melons and sycamores. Makes up music and Michiko. Who could hold out against lies like that?

Kochan #12

Getting Better Now there will be good times. I will come back from the picnic in Umbria with my friends. Back from the Aegean in the dusk with a beautiful woman or girl who loves me. My home will be filled with talk and happiness. I will go outside into the quiet and whisper to Michiko.

Kochan #11

Being Ready Being ready I watch and listen to the silence coming through the dark, narrow path of the world toward my small room. Michiko Nogami

Kochan #10

Missing Me It is not because of groaning on the rug nor the nights of missing her that I have lost me. Nor from grieving so much about Michiko’s loss of herself. That is only pain. I am like this watch which runs wrong because the thick new band separates it from the pulse.

Kochan #9

Dawn Waltz

If you were here now, Kochan, you and your body would be asleep in my other room. Having written all night, I would get into bed so quietly that when you did open your eyes you would see us dancing.

Kochan #8

Michiko Nogami (1946-1982) I try to see the smokestack against the sky and see the sky with a chimney in the way. A chimney and a winter sky and a woman not there. Smokestack and sky. This and that. Merely this and that. Is she more apparent because she is not any more forever? Is her whiteness more white because she was the color of pale honey? A smokestack making the sky more visible. A dead woman filling the whole world. Michiko said, The roses you gave me kept me awake with the sound of their petals falling.

Kochan #7

Transformations Is there no way to stop the houses falling within the bird’s body? Why must life go on testing the heart against metal? Such excess pours a terrible glaze over me. I can feel myself thickened by the unmoving sun as the dove in me flies on, shadowless as always. ~Michiko Nogami

Kochan #6

Married I came back from the funeral and crawled around the apartment crying hard, searching for my wife’s hair. For two months got them from the drain, the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator and off the clothes in the closet. But after other Japanese women came there was no way to be sure which were hers and I stopped. A year later, repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find this long black hair tangled in the dirt.

Kochan #5

Song A strange, nameless river runs from my heart into this world while I go happily trying to reach a country inhabited by no one.                       Michiko Nogami

Kochan #4

Secret Mornings

She does not wake in the morning. Or if she does, she looks over to my bed to see if I am watching. Sees I am and folds the blanket back from the futon a little and I visit her. We make love or we don’t and she sleeps. When she wakes again it is between morning and after. There is San Francisco sun in four of the six windows. She does not look for me but makes a small sound. I stand in the doorway and say Ohio, Michiko. She makes a different sound which pretends to complain. Poor thing, I say, and go to get the tea. After, she puts on the blue yukata and I return to my writing. There is the sound of water. Then the sounds of her making breakfast behind me. It’s ready, she says gently, and I carry the tray in. We have cabbage with eggs which she says is Japanese and it may be. Or we have udon with tofu and chopped green onions put in after. Then it is day.

Kochan #3

Jodo The smell of lemons. The Manyoshu  open face down. She crossing away from me. The leaks of sun through the shutters flaring on her nakedness.

Kochan #2

Rabbit in the room

A brown rabbit jumps

in my heart.

Goes out through my back.

Leaving us trapped

looking

with his tender eyes.

Michiko Nogami

Kochan: With Four Poems by Michiko Nogami

Hi Strangers. I’ll be posting a poem a day from the rare chapbook Kochan, an elegiac book of poems by Jack Gilbert on the death of Michiko Nogami. This book also includes four of her poems. I couldn’t find these poems anywhere online and the chapbook is hard to find these days, so I thought I’d share them in the order of their appearance in the chapbook. It is a tiny delicate thing wrapped in some kind of thin paper. Nights and Four Thousand Mornings I go out the back gate and past the orchard. Up the stream over the small sound of water. Through olive trees, under the big cypress, and come to a dirt road. When it curves left I am above the villa. Michiko raises her arms and I wave and the road climbs to the nunnery. I go past and down the other side onto the scree of a donkey trail. Soon I can see the village white and miniature far below by the sea. A path branches off through an old terrace to Linda’s shepherd hut. I look under the marble rock for messages. Leave a note and go on. Now Michiko will be in the shady arbor behind the house watching the swallows in the early morning sky or painting the fig tree or translating Heian poems. The trail drops faster across stone shelving. The farm with a child and a mean dog on the right. The old woman’s house with her dying husband after. It gets steeper and mostly boulders. I go too fast on their tops as a treat and come to the dry creek and rushes and thicket of oleander at the bottom of the mountain. It is hot now. Every wise man I met in Asia warned me against caring. Explained how everything I loved would get old, or be taken away and I would suffer. I tried to explain what a bargain it is. They patiently helped me understand. I said the Devil must care if he lets us get so much, as though he can’t resist something we are. Christopher Smart believed his cat, Jeoffry, played with the mouse to give it a chance, for one in seven escaped by his dallying. Across the flat farmland through ferocious sun. Bleak fields and straggling dry vineyards. Past the turn for the Valley Of the Owls where I lived three years before. I stop at the ugly fig tree for shade and the fruit. Then handsome fields of ripe barley with the Aegean very blue behind. Michiko was to be with me that year in the valley, but we had bad luck. Now she is sitting on the mountain under the jasmine. Like moonlight in midday, Linda said. She has sliced cucumbers and put them with lemon juice. I stop at the best fig tree. I pass the field of three black cows and pass the delicate goats. Cross the dribbling stream to plum treas in a walled garden. Stony plots again and severe heat. The farmhouses become more frequent and it is the edge of town. I buy tomatoes and eggs, squid for dinner and bread. Check the mail and start back. Zen monks circle a hill each day for a hundred days, then walk it for a hundred sitting in their spirit. I climb the Greek landscape daily in San Francisco, getting the ten miles and the light and Michiko clear. Today giant American winds churn violently in the firs and eucalyptus. Uprooting and tearing down. Their bulk is astonishing up close, like buffaloes at arm’s length. I move small among them in the strong air. Two possums cross a clearing and I recognize the faces of the dead. Two years and and I know Michiko is not like that. Her bones are burned clean and hidden in Japan. The Michiko I miss is the Michiko I contain. We are composed of memory. We are the past ignited in  the present. Without felt history, America is merely another country. Without Tuesday and the years before conscious in me, I am merely someone, uninflected. Our past is an orchestra which merges with the tenor now. The eleven years of Michiko are me. Those months in the gardens of Kyoto and she with me now amid these splintering trees are both happiness. Memory is the equity we have in our lives. Michiko calls softly out of the orchard in me. She eludes and laughs, gentle and pleased. I know she and her shy heart and small breasts are in there with the apple trees and figs, however invisible among the leaves. The air is fresh around her.