Joseph Woods

Where the word for beautiful is clean (2001)

What brought me out that morning
was the sound of someone on the roof

a monkey glanced down, then stared
away at the something interesting,

eating the core of a stolen apple,
hungry and halfway down its mountain.

I turned to see, snows had arrived
and Kyoto was below in its dip

surrounded by mountains gone white
overnight. For miles between,

millions of roof tiles covered and clean.

‘Where the Word for Beautiful is Clean ’ first appeared in Sailing to Hokkaido and is © Joseph Woods. For a note about Joseph Woods see ‘Sailing to Hokkaido’.