A Little Death

I was fasting that day when we went out into the farmlands
around Nagasaki, looking up referrals. After hours of walking,
we found ourselves on a ridge looking down on rice fields
      and a tiny village
work of life being carried on by Breughelesque distant figures
set as if to the foreign swelling of unripened music
under a mute old sun, all things basking in the glow
that fasting sometimes casts over the world.

We turned back there, never found that referral. When we got home
I felt wobbly but no rest for here was the mission assistant
whisking me off to visit Kurume and Sasebo. By Kurume
      I was feeling run over
and by Sasebo barely conscious, there delivered
to the naval base hospital—diagnosis: pneumonia.
Spent the next days in hourly ritual coughing: feet on the bed
hands on the floor, till I’d emptied my lungs of crap.

When I got out I was alone, for everyone had gone
up to the taikai: the big mission conference in Fukuoka.
I walked to the train station reveling in the lightness
      that accompanies recovery
but which this time went deeper. Weightless, companionless,
no mouth to my ear, no loyal soul-absorbing voice. but rather
every unkept pore seemed to breathe for the first time in Japan—
seemed to draw in the spirit of that garbled unmanageable world

of people calmly heading to places they never knew
      they’d never get to
a world of silent traffic, shops and houses wonderful, ordinary
      and strange—
and to breathe me out into that world, so that I seemed to be
not in Japan but inside Japan. Rules, too, had dissolved.
      Why, I could have . . .
but the thought never really occurred, only the quiet wish
to have this walk last as long as possible, and indeed
      it hasn’t ended yet.
Which train did I take to Fukuoka—the slow train or the express? At Fukuoka I was welcomed as one returning from a little death
for so it was, the first of several over the years—
                  a taste of what’s to come?
When the big one hits I imagine coming through the pass
                  out to a fork
the left road leading down into the plain where stands the Holy City
family and friends, symphonies ascending to the skies
the other a narrow trail leading deep into the mountains
silent, empty of a living soul. Maybe I’ll take that one.