marginalia

Kenneth Rexroth
22 December 1905 ~ 6 June 1982

I regret not finding time today properly to note Rexroth’s interest in and poems of Japan. The interest brought Japan to a generation of readers and many of those readers to Japan, and the poems are among the most beautiful that have been written of the country in English. I refer among others to the poems of The Heart’s Garden / The Garden’s Heart (Pym-Randall, 1967), On Flower Wreath Hill (Blackfish, 1976), The Silver Swan (Copper Canyon, 1976), The Love Poems of Marichiko (Christopher’s Books, 1978), and The Morning Star (New Directions, 1979, which includes Flower Wreath Hill, Silver Swan, and Marichiko). For now, this, set in Higashiyama, Kyoto, November 1974, from Flower Wreath Hill:

III
The full moon rises over
Blue Mount Hiei as the orange
Twilight gives way to dusk.
Kamo River is full with
The first rains of Autumn, the
Water crowded with colored
Leaves, red maple, yellow gingko,
On dark water, like Chinese
Old brocade. The autumn haze
Deepens until only the
Lights of the city remain.

IV
No leaf stirs. I am alone
In the midst of a hundred
Empty mountains. Cicadas,
Locusts, katydids, crickets,
Have fallen still, one after
Another. Even the wind
Bells hang motionless. In the
Blue dusk, widely spaced snowflakes
Fall in perfect verticals.
Yet, under my cabin porch,
The thin, clear Autumn water
Rustles softly like fine silk.

V
This world of ours, before we
Can know its fleeting sorrows,
We enter it through tears.
Do the reverberations
Of the evening bell of
The mountain temple ever
Totally die away?
Memory echoes and reechoes
Always reinforcing itself.
No wave motion ever dies.
The white waves of the wake of
The boat that rows away into
The dawn, spread and lap on the
Sands of the shores of all the world.

VI
Clustered in the forest around
The royal tumulus are
Tumbled and shattered gravestones
Of people no one left in
The world remembers. For the
New Year the newer ones have all been cleaned
And straightened and each has
Flowers or at least a spray
Of bamboo and pine.
It’s a great pleasure to
Walk through fallen leaves, but
Remember, you are alive,
As they were two months ago.

Image: Photograph by Gerard Malanga, American Poetry Review Records, 1971-1998.