Soseki’s Shrine

The mother bear stands on her hind legs to bat
hard green apples from the boughs, while two cubs
slide up the trunk as if black water should flow
upward and disappear into shuddering leaves.
The third cub rummages for fruit in tall grass.
The apples are tiny and sour. The bears
are hungry, working hard. The whole meadow
strives, shakes with striving, as crickets thrum
and dragonflies slice the air and overhead
the peregrine falcon floats its high, staccato cry.
My fingers are stained with ink. In Kyoto,
in Soseki’s ancient temple, the stone basin for mixing ink
stands upright, a shrine to writing. At its base
water in a trough. A dipper. One dips, one pours
water over one’s hands. One prays to write
purely. How hard, when we want so much.
We’re hungry, we want to leave our names.
“Scholar’s hands,” the exiled researcher told me,
holding my hands in hers. “Calluses.
Ink stains. Rough cuticles. Hands that work.”
She’s dead now. Musō Soseki’s pond
has lasted for seven hundred years.