Poetry Magazine
Appleblossom
Difficult shacks of Kushiro, too far afield, at least theirs are not
our roofless griefs even farther in the marshes that are huge buckets
of green tea in the rainy season—you glisten as you go, Bashō,
wring out your sleeves. Frog keeps its knees in its armpits on plant flotilla
and Duck of all the birds is shaped most like a canoe. We were not built
for this and anyway, standing smack dab in no-man’s-land you can stop
and say, Here is a place made famous in poems. Aren’t you such a place?
Each “Appleblossom” is a verse translation from the Japanese of a short selection from the notebooks of Chiri, Bashō’s traveling companion during the years between Withered Chestnuts and Travelogue of Weatherbeaten Bones.
Source: Poetry (October 2008).
Biography
Eric Ekstrand is an MFA candidate at the University of Houston where he holds an Inprint/Brown Foundation Fellowship and teaches writing. He is a poetry editor at Gulf Coast.
Poems by Eric Ekstrand
Poem Categorization
SUBJECT Relationships, Friends & Enemies, Activities, Travels & Journeys, Nature, Landscapes & Pastorals, Arts & Sciences, Poetry & Poets
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