WEBVTT

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Two poems.

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This is called "Listening."

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And when my wife was
pregnant with our daughter

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for the first time, I was
obsessed with our daughter.

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And I made a tape of my voice,
and I'd put the headphones

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on her belly--

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[LAUGHTER]

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--so that our daughter used
my voice as well as hers,

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and I used to love
just lying on her belly

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and listening to
the little thumps.

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So this is imagining
an ancestor of mine

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doing what I was doing at
the time, which is listening

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to his wife's belly.

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And the images come
on the scroll--

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when I visited Japan
I saw this scroll

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outside my
grandparents' hometown.

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"Listening."

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A torii is a Shinto gate;
hachimaki is the headbands;

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shoji are the paper doors.

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"Listening."

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And from that village,
steaming with mist,

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riddled with rain, for the
fishermen in the bay hauling up

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nets of silver flecks, for the
droning of the Buddhist priest

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and the morning incense
thickening his voice-- a bit

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otherworldly, almost sickly.

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For the oysters ripped from the
sea bottom by half naked women,

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their skin darker than
the bark in the woods,

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their lungs as endless as some
cave where a demon dwells.

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Soon their harvests
will be split open

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by a blade-- moist, meaty flesh
drenched in the smell of sea

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bracken, the tidal winds.

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For the torii halfway up
the mountain and the steps

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to the temple where the
gong shimmers with echoes

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of bright metallic sound.

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For the waterfall streaming,
hovering in the eye,

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and an illusion rising.

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From the cedars that have
nothing to do with time.

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From the small
mud-drenched streets

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of rice shops and fishmongers.

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From pebbles on the riverbed,
the aquamarine stream,

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floating pine trunks
filled up stream by men

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with hachimaki tied
on their forehead

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and grunts of yoisho I remember
from my father in childhood.

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For this mythical land of
the empty sign and 1,000,

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1,000 manners, and the tip of
this peninsula far from Kyoto,

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the shogun's palace.

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In the house of shoji
and clean cut pine,

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crawling onto a straw
futon, one of his ancestors

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lay his head, as I do
now, on a woman's belly

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and felt an imperceptible bump,
like the bow of a boat hitting

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the swell, and wondered
how anything so tiny

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could cause such
rocking unbroken joy.

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