Past Smoldering

My paternal grandfather smoked a pipe. Perhaps this is why the empty bowl leaves a trace in my mind of a clear image of not only emptiness but coolness as well as the lingering aroma. We take the poem beyond its still smoking ending into our experience of the object mindful of a kind of imitative follow-through of the poem's hints.

When I woke, everything seemed cut off.
I was pipe, still smoking,
Which daylight would knock empty once again.

Shinkichi Takahashi. Afterimages: Zen Poems translated by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto.

And so for day 1418
31.10.2010