{"id":89,"date":"2010-11-19T18:30:03","date_gmt":"2010-11-19T23:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/?p=89"},"modified":"2010-11-19T18:30:03","modified_gmt":"2010-11-19T23:30:03","slug":"tom-lowenstein","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/2010\/89\/poems\/tom-lowenstein\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Lowenstein"},"content":{"rendered":"

Conversation with Murasaki <\/strong><\/p>\n

Murasaki<\/em> – I imagined
\na dye the colour of mulberries.
\nA burnet moth’s underwing.<\/p>\n

She brushes past Sei Shonagon.
\nSleeves in tension.
\nBoth brushes charged with silken resistance.<\/p>\n

When she sang it was brocade.
\nWhen she modestly whispered,
\na most delicate embroidery.<\/p>\n

‘Her sash matched her robe.
\nBut did you notice the lining of her sleeve?
\nI could have laughed all evening!’<\/p>\n

The wisteria in its tub, whose ancient stem
\nand transient clusters you comprehended clearly,
\nbut which you did not know how to prune.<\/p>\n

How many such cultivated
\nand also promiscuous ladies
\nhave I wished to have been acquainted with?<\/p>\n

Late afternoon rain,
\nthen sun on the raspberries –
\nI so wanted to show you.<\/p>\n

How vulgar would you think it
\nto express my predilection
\nfor these extra yellow quinces?<\/p>\n

Please tell me: how, culturally, could we
\nbe more different? Yet I, with minor, bemused
\nreservations, am drawn entirely to your aesthetic.<\/p>\n

So many little rules.
\nHow delicious to break one!
\nWe’ll mend these fragments into something.<\/p>\n

His long night’s escapade.
\nDoes inherited custom demand
\nrupture of tradition?<\/p>\n

Dilapidated mansion. Tangled thickets.
\nBehind a screen,
\nshe waits for moon-rise.<\/p>\n

Having sunk to this obscurity
\nshe still plies the koto<\/em>.
\nNo one behind screens to listen.<\/p>\n

Shut in from sunlight,
\nshe keeps company with rain and music.
\nWasting beneath powder.<\/p>\n

What happens in the Genji<\/em>?
\nBirths, fixation, death and an eroticism by subterfuge
\ndelayed tantalisingly by the complicated exchange of waka<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The plum which in the 16th century was
\nsupplanted by the cherry. Aesthetically staggered,
\ndo they now blossom in competition?<\/p>\n

Lamp light. Moon-rise.
\nI look up. Does the moon, too,
\nsay I<\/em>?<\/p>\n

The floating world.
\nWe move within it.
\nIt. We.<\/em> Tangle and illusion.<\/p>\n

High above the city, he searches out
\ntwo things that grow together:
\nwild herbs and the sutras.<\/p>\n

It is comparatively simple to satisfy desire.
\nBut to die without studying the sutras…
\nStill, it makes little difference.<\/p>\n

A poignant meditation on the doctrine of the anicca<\/em>.
\nThen all at once
\nthey’re playing football.<\/p>\n

Guarding against presenting things
\nonly in the best possible taste,
\nthus he expressed an asymmetrical aesthetic.<\/p>\n

A trunk that grew lichen.
\nA stone that happened to
\nlie on the mountain.<\/p>\n

I know how loud and irregular noises
\ndisturbed you. I too live
\nin your ideal silence.<\/p>\n

To be old and still young.
\nAt once female and male.
\nWe are all one prison.<\/p>\n

You would be astonished
\nat the squalor of European history.
\nBut you would have liked Jane Austen.<\/p>\n

Spirit possession.
\nThe hysterical luxury
\nof existence as two people.<\/p>\n

No longer even dust.
\nYour you<\/em> became
\nsomeone else’s brush strokes.<\/p>\n

Waley on his deathbed.
\nNeither he<\/em> nor his<\/em> space.
\nBut now equal with not-you in north London traffic.<\/p>\n

‘Genji was dead. And there was no one like him.’
\nPunks eat sushi.
\nMono no aware. Lacrimae rerum.<\/em><\/p>\n

These MSN and Myspace girls whose virtual selves
\nfire off keyboard fantasies: they, as with Genji’s
\nwomen, gossip apprehensively behind their screens.<\/p>\n

There they all must be
\nin Ambitabha’s garden, where birds and rivers
\nsing unintelligibly in Sanskrit.<\/p>\n

The Bridge of Dreams joins two absolute spaces.
\nWe rush across the surface
\nnot knowing where we were or where we’re headed.<\/p>\n

Hokku<\/em> faxed from a tobacconist.
\nSyllabically hopping,
\nto Tokyo they yo yo.<\/p>\n

—————<\/p>\n

Murasaki Shikibu was the 11th century author of The Tale of Genji<\/em>, which contains almost a thousand classical verses. Sei Shonagon was her contemporary and the author of The Pillow Book<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Koto<\/em>: a zither-like instrument
\nWaka<\/em>: classical verses
\nMono no aware<\/em>: ‘the pitiful transcience of existence’
\nAnicca<\/em>: impermanence
\nAmbitabha: the Buddha of the Western Paradise or Pure Land
\nHokku<\/em>: 17-syllable verse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conversation with Murasaki Murasaki – I imagined a dye the colour of mulberries. A burnet moth’s underwing. She brushes past Sei Shonagon. Sleeves in tension. Both brushes charged with silken resistance. When she sang it was brocade. When she modestly whispered, a most delicate embroidery. ‘Her sash matched her robe. But did you notice the […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems","category-4-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions\/90"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}