From The Cold

Something Quaint For Winter Please: A Noh Poem


I.

I was woken up by children
playing in the backyard,

our house open to the village
because the evenings were long.

It had the biggest willows,
and a magnolia tree, a Rostrata.

I’ve never felt more Chinese in Chinatown,
climbing the one pagoda in its main street,

looking out its highest point.
I only ever walked into the corner church

out of desperation.
Tried my hand at the sense of belonging,

the camaraderie the others in my pew felt,
and the one in front of me,

and behind me, as we shook hands
in communal blessing.

Yukio Mishima’s play was on outside,
talking of cold nights getting colder.


II.

Ritual didn’t restore me to what I was,
some essential good.

In time, everything seemed a broken piece
of something else.

Borrowed and ranging,
yet at times still startling, as if originary.

This observation became haunting with age,
overbearingly so.

But excess, like Kerouac in Big Sur,
always brought me here.

It was the desperation
— not fear of death or punishment —

that left me in bed for days,
as if my life had been taken

from under me. Not stolen
but simply removed, calmly,

like an inflamed appendix.
“It must be your spiritus at work.”


III.

The preacher in my head said this,
as a matter of fact.

To myself, so it seemed somewhat mixed
up and discomforting.

Yet sensible and important,
even quaint, to stay the moment.

Quaint inevitably got my attention.
The quaint waiter in a denim jacket.

He took our orders only after he’d twice
looked us over, thought us worth his while.

Red marker in his apron pocket to circle tabs
that needed to be bumped up a few bucks.

“Douchebag needed to be taught a lesson,”
he said, a wry smile.

It was hypnotic,
how the other man would walk in from the right.

It was Yukio Mishima himself, all wrapped up
in sheepskin and a shawl from Kashmir.


IV.

He would pass through the first scene, genuflect,
cross a threshold, pass through the next.

Then came a flash of light, bright burst
that reflected off the large sheet of foil.

It was swivel theatre, like a turnstile.
Like a small book you flipped through quickly

to get stick figures to walk, big strides
through White Mountain.

The children walked the same way, our orchard
like a portal. To take in the different scents,

pluck a flower for their books.
The smaller children liked to play janggi

on the sturdier branches, to swing on them.
They sang songs too, as Yukio Mishima wrote

of black pine and climbing a tree to see
whole cities and the world’s lights.

If only to bring in the solstice, this long night
before another dawn of good things.