JAPANToday I pass the time readinga favorite haiku, saying the few words over and over. It feels like eatingthe same small, perfect grapeagain and again.I walk through the house reciting itand leave its letters fallingthrough the air of every room.I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.I say it in front of a painting of the sea.I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.I listen to myself saying it, then I say it without listening, then I hear it without saying it. And when the dog looks up at me,I kneel down on the floorand whisper it into each of his long white ears. It's the one about the one-ton temple bellwith the moth sleeping on its surface, and every time I say it, I feel the excruciatingpressure of the mothon the surface of the iron bell. When I say it at the window, the bell is the worldand I am the moth resting there. When I say it at the mirror,I am the heavy belland the moth is life with its papery wings. And later, when I say it to you in the dark, you are the bell, and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you, and the moth has flownfrom its lineand moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.
Billy Collins
The whole idea of it makes me feellike I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach acheor the headaches I get from reading in bad light--a kind of measles of the spirit,a mumps of the psyche,a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgottenthe perfect simplicity of being oneand the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard.I could make myself invisibleby drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince. But now I am mostly at the windowwatching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnlyagainst the side of my tree house, and my bicycle never leaned against the garageas it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time to turn the first big number. It seems only yesterday I used to believethere was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,I skin my knees. I bleed.
poem
poem japan
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