Tonight I'd like to read mostly a sequence of poems
written for my wife.
They all have a particular feeling in relation
to Japan, where I've lived for the last 10 years,
off and on, making a few trips to America now and then.
The land and the gods of the land are very important.
And to give these poems a place, I'd
like to say a little bit about what Japan is.
Japan is a string of volcanic islands off the coast of Asia
which is very unstable.
And it's geologically relatively recent,
which gives it a particular feeling.
Those things are very necessary to feel, I think.
Like one time, I was driving across Texas with Keith Wilson,
from Houston to El Paso.
And finally it occurred to me what was wrong with Texas.
I said, this land is unstable.
It's been in and out of the water for the last million
years--
or the last billion years, actually.
And Texas is a genuinely unstable part of the continent.
It's been underwater and out of water and underwater
and out of water, which gives it a peculiarly unstable feeling,
I think.
Japan is also unstable, but not in an unpleasant way,
in a fiery kind of way.
The Japanese islands are a continual battleground
between the air masses of the continent
and the air masses of the Pacific.
And you can actually feel, within a space of 12 hours
sometimes, one mass or the other mass winning, cool, dry air
coming over from Siberia, and dropping the temperature 30
degrees, and drying everything out,
and then a warm, moist, almost subtropical air mass
from the Pacific sweeping in and bringing rains and changing it
again completely.
So the elements that make Japan are
volcanism and moving air and clouds, shifts of rain and dry.
The winter is essentially a victory for Siberia
and its dry continental air.
The winter is essentially a Pacific victory.
And it has the tail ends of the monsoons,
and has a summer monsoon climate, which makes
it possible to grow wet rice.
You can only grow wet rice where you
have a monsoon climate, the heavy rains all coming
during the hot season.
And Japan is much farther off the coast of Asia
than England is, say, off the coast of Europe.
The two countries have sometimes been compared.
And in some ways the comparisons are interesting.
But it's a much more difficult journey by sea to Japan.
And the early voyagers that went there
must have had considerable nerve to go that far.
One more point about Japan, speaking of voyages,
the very first level of population
didn't go there on a ship.
They probably walked there.
At the same time that the Bering was open and dry,
Japan was connected to the Chinese mainland
at about where Shandong is.
And the Okinawan Islands and Taiwan
all made, apparently, a kind of a chain,
so that at the same time that the peoples who
became the American Indians, or at least one
of the early waves of the American Indians,
were traveling up north and across the Bering,
a band of their brothers took a more southerly route
and went out into the Japanese islands, very possibly
the same period of migrations of the early Mongoloid peoples.
This sequence is called Regarding Wave.
It will be published as a book, maybe this spring,
by the Wendover Press at the University of Iowa.
I think it will just be in a small edition.
Regarding wave is a kind of pun on the name of the Buddhist
Bodhisattva, goddess of compassion, Guanyin.
Or in Japanese, Kan-on.
In Sanskrit, Avalokitesvara.
The name means, literally, "regard the sound."
And sound is waves, so regarding wave.
The reason sound is important is because, in this world
epic, this present kalpa, they say that the sense of sound
is, of all the senses, the sense by which it
is most possible to achieve enlightenment.
Wave.
Grooving clamshell, streaked-through marble,
sweeping down Ponderosa pine bark scale,
ripcut tree grain, sand dunes, lava, flow, wave, wife, woman,
wifman, veiled, vibrating, vague.
Sawtooth ranges pulsing.
Veins on the back of the hand.
Forked-out bird's foot alluvium wash.
Great dunes rolling, each inch rippled, every grain a wave.
Leaning against sand cornices till they blow away.
Wind, shake, stiff thorns of cholla, ocotillo.
Sometimes I get stuck in thickets.
Ah, trembling spreading radiating wife, racing zebra,
catch me and fling me wide to the dancing grain of things,
of my mind
One gloss on that--
the word, "woman," old English wifman, wave man.
The word, wife, also wif, wife is wave.
Woman is wave man.
Cognates are veiled and vague.
The proto Indo-European root is v,
which apparently means, as they can figure, vibration,
vibrating.
So woman is the vibrator.