Miyamoto Musashi's Poetry

we reconstruct the man
from shards of paper and pottery
(a shrike in ink
a small wooden bodhisattva
a practical treatise on swordplay)

he said his only teacher was Nature
which is a fine thing to say
when you're good at everything

they say he slew Ganryū
with a length of oar
he'd whittled on impulse into a sword

so much for the soul of the samurai:
not metal, flashing and hard
priceless and irreplaceable

only a discarded wooden spar
emerging from refuse
to refuse returning

and perhaps his poems were the same
nourished by earth and water
whispering an answer to wind
burbling off towards the long sea

and this is how history left him
and this is how I might find him:

an old man on a mountain
preparing future warriors for poetry
writing his way back
into the world that wrote him

when he emerges from his grotto to converse with the single scarred wholeness of the moon, I steal towards his poems and brush the pages across my hands, like reaching for a damselfly at rest, to see how his brush struck a river through the page. My guard thus lowered, I do not see him enter; and this old man, who holds life and death in either callused hand—this man asks me with a child's eagerness which ones I like best, and whether I would like to take any of them home with me; and I smile, relieved, as if a falling hawk had not struck my eyes, but instead alighted on my glove; and I say, no need, I will remember them.

and in these days you may notice me grinning at nothing, or pausing on the morning after a storm to admire a branch that has split our path; I may spend time contemplating a mushroom, or a flickering bat; perhaps I'll take a breath, secretly watching your eyes sing across space like the compass moon; yes, perhaps you'll notice

and you may stare and ask me what I am doing

and I will answer

"I am reading Miyamoto Musashi's poetry."