untitled poem by Yosano Akiko, translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Come at last to this point

I look back on my passion
And realize that I
Have been like a blind man
Who is unafraid of the dark.

Alone by Jack Gilbert

I never thought Michiko would come back

after she died. But if she did, I knew

it would be as a lady in a long white dress.

It is strange that she has returned

as somebody's dalmatian. I meet

the man walking her on a leash

almost every week. He says good morning

and I stoop down to calm her. He said

once that she was never like that with

other people. Sometimes she is tethered

on their lawn when I go by. If nobody

is around, I sit on the grass. When she

finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap

and we watch each other's eyes as I whisper

in her soft ears. She cares nothing about

the mystery. She likes it best when

I touch her head and tell her small

things about my days and our friends.

That makes her happy the way it always did.

Soul Mates

"I don’t know how you are so familiar to me—or why it feels less like I am getting to know you and more as though I am remembering who you are. How every smile, every whisper brings me closer to the impossible conclusion that I have known you before, I have loved you before—in another time, a different place, some other existence.” - 

Lang Leav

For Jane

By Charles Bukowski

225 days under grass 
and you know more than I. 
they have long taken your blood, 
you are a dry stick in a basket. 
is this how it works? 
in this room 
the hours of love 
still make shadows. 

when you left 
you took almost 
everything. 
I kneel in the nights 
before tigers 
that will not let me be. 

what you were 
will not happen again. 
the tigers have found me 
and I do not care.

A Girl

By Ezra Pound 

The tree has entered my hands, 
The sap has ascended my arms, 
The tree has grown in my breast - 
Downward, 
The branches grow out of me, like arms. 

Tree you are, 
Moss you are, 
You are violets with wind above them. 
A child - so high - you are, 
And all this is folly to the world. 

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

By Li Po, translated by Ezra Pound

WHILE my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse;
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:         
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.        
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look-out?

At sixteen you departed,        
You went into far Ku-to-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,       
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the west garden—
They hurt me.         
I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you, As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

This poem still breaks my heart and I don't know why.