Lines with Kazuo Ohno (newly discovered)

        Lines with Kazuo Ohno

   This flower I hold

  is my pain, my neck

falls up into place

  from it's proud

   sunken

wreckage

 Soars up, soars up

 again from whatever was

   lost wings

 lost earth

  into itself again

  There are no remains

  Daily forgetting's feet

    the flower's

  petals' lips trickle

   and falter

     faint and grow

   fonder of the luminous

      shadow all

   footfalls make

   all rubble in the forest of memory

     tiny rubble

       whose luthier of leaves

    the forest of memory

       scatters in tone...

   my head overgrown,

     knots in memory,

      crumbles -- into sodden hollows

     some fungus maybe me

     some tender

     medicinal peat my head

       empties, clears

     against this spine

     my prickly stem

   once holding the fruit of light the sun eats

       bows low as going goes

    and lower still

       do climb the bones

        in the descent beyond hell

   

      the soothing mud

     walking the walk beneath us

       fathoms down in folds

          and that further clatter, do you hear?

             down they go in the deep crater

         with the silly red ones, flickering, a bit rebellious, as

      angels nevertheless rise re-immersed

         in the huddled nest, 

           and the mother is on her way

       whoever you see, first

   

        I fold my hands.

        It's finished for now.

        I think. 

        Jeff Gburek

         Notebooks 2009