POEM
A Case of Netsuke
Wise, size of a peachpit, nut-
brown, wizened, intricate,
the Badger Dressed in Lotus Leaf
stands tall in his sheet: as grand
or grander than Rodin’s Balzac, and
even smacks of evil, as
he has the full, unruffled gaze
of the Wolf under Grandmother’s nightgown.
The better to draw you close, my dear,
to a museum-case of obscure
Japanese bibelots. Each
a tangible anecdote, they reach
first to us from English tags:
Starving Dog, Herdboy with Flute,
Dutchman with Moneybag, or Stoat
on Pumpkin, Bean Pods, Pile of Fish ...
As if that wordless, brimming wish
to get everything said before
we’re dead might be fulfilled at last,
they speak to us of a lost
life we may have lived once, though
it’s daunting we should think so—
for what could we have had in common
with Seated Demon or Drunken Sprite?
And by what twist does Thwarted Rat-
Catcher call up the aim of Art?
Yet that look of his, of being thwarted,
as he crouches over the empty cage
and, too late, lifts his club to thwack
the rat scaling his own back,
is intimately familiar—like
the downturned, howling mask of tragic
theater. If somehow the play
of his features also shows he’s half-
laughing, it may be at himself:
grinning, with a shrunken skull’s
grim triumph, or like a set of false
teeth that’s doubled over in
age-yellowed ivory,
he’s detached from his unsavory
and blunt stabs at success. The gift,
he chides himself, is to be swift
and tireless; to hit on a connection—
not just pummel the rat but tell
the whole tale in a nutshell.
Mary Jo Salter, “A Case of Netsuke” from Unfinished Painting. Copyright © 1989 by Mary Jo Salter. Reprinted with the permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Source: Unfinished Painting: Poems (1989)
