AND AFTER YOU ALL BECOME RETICENT SHADOWS

And after you all became reticent shadows
and had gone further upstream,
of course I, too, wielded my rod
and threw in here and there.

But when I was alone the voices of strangers
merged with the roar of the water
so that I couldn’t tell whether I was watching
a real river or dreaming.

A blue-feathered bird out of the dark branches
pierced the water and flew away with a fish in its beaks.
Was it my having already become the river
that made me just then feel a sharp pain?

Ordinarily I’d have understood the bird to mean
my sharpened desire to write a poem,
and the fish a fragment of something astir in the subconscious,
an archetype of my dream.

Yet I felt, unexpectedly, so deeply aggrieved
that I set my rod and creel on the bank
and retrieved a small flask of whiskey
I had hidden under some river pebbles.

The overgrown wild udo was too hard to eat
but chewing it released a fresh fragrance within my mouth.
Imagining Nakagami and Yagi,
my friends who had invited me here,

searching the river for fish
with an utterly practical mind
I sat down on a big dry rock.

AND AFTER YOU ALL BECAME RETICENT SHADOWS