April Poetry | James McKeon

In recognition of Poetry Month, and to celebrate and highlight our treasure trove of Orcas Island poets, Orcas Issues is pleased and honored to again offer daily poetry during April.

Three Poems Inspired by Old Paintings from East Asia

— James McKeon —

A Woodblock Print by Hiroshige, about 1856 called Fireworks at Ryogoku

A few days from now, my old life will end.

Though most of this life has been spent here in Kyoto as a scribe
in the employ of My Gracious Lord, through whose generosity,
I am at last able to retire on a small but adequate stipend, it seems impossible to comprehend the passage of so much elapsed time,
or to think how all those years dwarf by comparison
my life before I came here.

Occasionally, however, as if launched into the night sky by rocket,
a memory from those childhood days in Edo rises. Long before my birth,
Edo celebrated Kawabiraki, the annual ‘Opening of the River’ festival
and its fireworks set off from the middle of the bridge at Ryogoku.
I can see it still from remembered vantage points…

From the bridge itself, with other strollers,
the water swarming with river craft of all sizes and descriptions,
from restaurants on the shore, their lights off, or at least dimmed
so as to better see the lights blossoming overhead that
one by one died away just as the fiery red line of the next
rose impossibly swift and high, until finally, in a great crescendo
of many colors and percussive blasts,
like the long fleeting life of things,
it died…

Only to emerge again, here now, near the very end.

An anonymous hanging scroll, The Emperor Ming-huang’s Journey To Shu, ink and colors on silk, 11th Century copy of *8th Century original

A long, long time ago
The Emperor, fleeing a rebellion in the capital,
sought succor, from powerful allies in remote Szechwan.
With a few trusted followers, some mounted and some on foot, he
climbed ever higher on mist shrouded paths leading through
vertical green mountains, carved by gods on the road to Shu.

It is said by some that at last they reached their destination,
and established there the Southern Sung dynasty, but I for one
can hardly credit such a feat unless those paths were far less
vertical than imagined, or else those men
were gods themselves.

Tao-chi: A Man in a House Beneath a Cliff, Watercolor about 1700

So certain is the hand that wields the brush
one feels it need never lift off the paper,
nor consult the eye, for it is in touch with forces
beyond mere fact or earthly matter:

A house folded inside the rock flowing from
within the birthing mountain is the man who
lives within and is his face. All come together,
tell us who we are, from whence we come,
where we disappear…