Blossoms Scattered, Eyes Scratched

The 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology has a selection from nominated poet Fanny Howe. Her On the Ground which I continuously misquote as Open Ground by some concatenation with Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996 of Seamus Heaney. In any event I was caught by these lines

Maybe the end of the world happened long ago
A whirl as quick as Judas breaking his neck
and every sound is an echo

There is of course the end rhyme (ago - echo) and the internal rhyme (quick - break - neck). And the subtle shift in tense.

I dwell on this suggestion of what might have happened if events had not led to Judas hanging himself. The "maybe" here is picked up by a later question : can I?

Can I toss them aside
like an armful of sticks and set out as a feeling
to find Hana and Issa across the night

Never mind the referent of "them" for the moment. Let us concentrate on objects of a search: Issa could be the Japanese haiku poet but there is no poet in the tradition that readily responds to the name Hana. (We could be dealing here with pets — household felines.) We can find hana in the poetry of Issa. It is not a proper name but the word for "blossom". We are here deforming on a search of our own not quite tossing aside brain and skeleton which are the immediate referents to the notoriously slippery "them".

Why I like the blossom-connection regardless of authorial intention:

hana saku ya me wo nuwaretaru tori no naku

cherry blossoms--
chickens with eyes stitched shut
are clucking

David Lanoue highlights this poem and its translation and provides commentary in his Master Bashô, Master Buson ... and Then There’s Issa appearing in Simply Haiku Autumn 2005, vol 3 no 3.

Jean Cholley notes that in the poultry market in the Muromachi district of Edo (today's Tokyo), the eyes of the doomed birds were sewn shut to keep them immobile while being fattened in their cages (237). Issa sketches this not-pretty scene with blunt honesty. And though he utters no emotional words, one feels his heart going out to the birds who cannot see, and never again will see, the cherry blossoms.

Reference: Cholley, Jean. En village de miséreux: Choix de poèmes de Kobayashi Issa. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.

Can I now return to where the echo began to reverberate? But I have lost a world. Gone like a "single bubble in steeping tea" the meaning according to Robert Hass of Issa's name. But accessible again to more complicated readings when one considers that Judas is Greek for Judah which in Hebrew means "thanksgiving, praise". Worth pursuing? Feeling one's way across the night? Finding scattered on the ground? Inventing like a way to read with eyes stitched shut and mind wide open?

And so for day 1281
16.06.2010