Tales

• Harbour Town
• Five Monsters
• The Commutation

Poems

• The Winter Slippers
• Persimmons
• Spider and Bee
• The Captain’s Walk in Summer
• Ozasa
• In the Spring Garden
• Memory and Flesh
• The Tobacconist
• It was on another morning

Photographs

• Shadowflowers
• Embracing Rivers – Persimmon leaf
• Naniwa rose
• Cicada’s wing in autumn
• Embracing Rivers – Cabbage leaf

Poems

The Winter Slippers

The winter slippers are drying outside.
In the kitchen, the ants are active again.
In the distant past, Artaxerxes contemplates defeat,
Wondering how it might have been
Had he been born Assyrian.

You will be angry with me
If I miss the chance to bring the slippers in
Before it begins to rain again.
You may soon telephone to remind me.

And I will tell you how the ants
Are straying from their safer paths
And getting underfoot – how I cannot tell
Why they are so stimulated there
In a barren corner of the kitchen.

You will be angry with me: you will know
The slippers are outside, that my mind
Is in the distant past, with Artaxerxes in the field,
As battle weary horses pull their empty chariots,
Straying from the field,
Like the ants across the kitchen floor.

Dust is everywhere – under leather, under metal –
Grinding unnoticed into his skin.
Was it like this for them – the question rises in him –
Like this, too, for the Assyrians?

He’d seen the monuments, heard the stories.
Felt nothing more than awe before, and envy,
Then the reflex of imperial precedent –
And finally this heat, this dust, the wayward horses.
It comes to this: I know how time became
A narrow path, so narrow it disappeared from view.

I saw the horses on the plain, and knew
Time is the same for horses as for ants;
Time is a path for monuments and stone,
But not for me: Artaxerxes on the plain,
Outside time, blind to the path that makes him, too, Assyrian.

There is still time to change, for the horses to return,
For the ants to find the breakfast crumbs –
And although I try your patience
There is still time before the rain:
I will return and clean my armour;
I will bring the winter slippers in.

Time is what the ants and horses understand,
What weighs on me and makes the spring blow cold –
Like defeat for Artaxerxes – understanding
How, with all this time, there is so little I can know.
I stand immobile, and invent disasters they all knew before,
And I am afraid as Artaxerxes never was.

Will you telephone to remind me?–
I will be trapped here till your voice
Restores me to the path of ants and horses,
Of winter slippers and of distant kings.

Also from
Nishigawa Kobo

An Andalusian Dog’s Life
the case of my
detached retina
by Yaemi Shigyo

Click here for extracts.

Click here to order.