Afterimages: Zen Poems by Shinkichi Takahashi

Properly, we shd. read for power. Man reading shd. be man intensely alive. The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hands.

—EZRA POUND, Guide to Kulchur

Takahashi is a Zennist as purely as San Juan de la Cruz and Saint Teresa are Christian (Dante and Milton remain students of bliss with feet surely stuck in the often muddy field of dogma). Shinkichi Takahashi is a poet, truly a foreign poet, so foreign that our taxonomy exhausts itself until we remember that an encounter with a true poet usually has this quality of foreignness. You need know nothing of Zen to become immersed in his work. You will inevitably know something of Zen when you emerge, but that is not my purpose here. I will try to keep my Western feet out of my mouth by leaving Zen to those who are masters, and opt for a manic attempt to get an American poetry audience to buy and read this book.

The sixties and early seventies have been predominantly an “internationalist” phase in American poetry. The energies behind this phase are ubiquitous and it has slowly gathered a great deal of energy since Kenneth Rexroth said it was happening in a rather cranky New Directions essay back in 1956. He was on the money, it seems, a precursor whose renditions from the Japanese and Chinese never got the interest they deserved in the midst of the new and vibrant introductions to European, Russian, Latin American poetry appearing everywhere. Jerome Rothenberg and others even attempted to introduce us to the poetry of those Native Americans, the Indians.

But work from the East appeared more slowly, despite Whaley, Pound, Blyth, Rexroth, and dozens of others. And after an early interest in a rather Zennist sort of “image” Pound went awry in Confucianism, which is grand for a good society but a less meaty source for poetry. As a poet I would frankly not trade a single wanka from Dogen for the sum of Confucius. And if good government interests you more than the Diamond Sutra, take a civil-service exam. But I wander. In my own muddled head the East entered slowly through the proselytizers everyone knows about—Suzuki, Watts etc.—but more dominantly by way of poets like Clayton Eshleman and Cid Corman, and most powerfully of all through Gary Snyder. Snyder is a marvelous poet to read, a very disturbing poet to be around, and a Zen Buddhist. Now Lucien Stryk must be added to this list. He translated After-images with Takashi Ikemoto, and has published a number of books dealing with Zen in addition to his own poetry. We understand how desperately feeble and parochial our poetry is when Shinkichi Takahashi reaches seventy-two before all but a very few of us know he exists.

Oddly, Takahashi is perilously available. He is not one of those poets of whom we lamely say that “he cannot be quoted.” In my notes I find twenty-two poems I want to quote in whole or part. Afterimages owns a “thingness,” an omniscience about the realities that seems to typify genius of the first order. If one image is worth many volumes as Pound infers, what may a thousand images be worth? Takahashi, of course, would say they are worth nothing. But that is an Olympian view that we need not concern ourselves with. He is there. We are here. Knut Hamsun was within this mode when he told an interviewer he wrote because it “didn't matter.” So were Li Po and Tu Fu when they stood on a bridge together one evening composing poems on leaves and throwing them into the river.

But this thingness—when Takahashi writes of a crow, it is an actual crow, not as so often in our poetry, a convenient fulcrum on which to dangle an idea or our neuroses:

CROW

The crow, spreading wide wings,

Flapped lazily off.

Soon her young will be doing the same,

Firm wings rustling.

It's hard to tell the male

Crow from the female,

But their love, their mating

Must be fresh as their flight.

Asleep in a night train,

I felt my hat fly off.

The crow was lost in mist,

The engine ploughed into the sea.

This quality of “thingness” is allowed to reach monstrous levels of consciousness in “Destruction”:

DESTRUCTION

The universe is forever falling apart—

No need to push the button.

It collapses at a finger's touch:

Why, it barely hangs on the tail of a sparrow's eye.

The universe is so much eye secretion,

Hordes leap from the tips

Of your nostril hairs. Lift your right hand:

It's in your palm. There's room enough

On the sparrow's eyelash for the whole.

A paltry thing, the universe:

Here is all strength, here the greatest strength.

You and the sparrow are one

And, should he wish, he can crush you.

The universe trembles before him.

It is difficult to characterize metaphor except with metaphor. Afterimages is like seeing a long, beautifully filmed movie on a hundred mammals we didn't know existed. And after the movie many of the animals decide to step from the screen and live with you. They don't ask. You simply have to make room. This quality of freedom of imagination is so prepossessing that other aspects are easily forgotten. But we stumble over all of the greasy dogma we attach to “freedom” while we don't over a sparrow. Or the magpie in “Magpie”:

MAGPIE

I start across the bridge.

Coining toward me from the other side,

A woman, drenched and perhaps

Having failed to purchase apples, mutters—

“Sardines, sardines.” Below, listening,

A magpie bobs mournfully up and down.

It is a long black bridge,

So long that to cross it is unthinkable.

My white breath dies, rises and dies.

Life: dust on a bridge rail.

Wars, revolutions: bubbles on a stream.

Late in the frosty night, alone,

I cross an endless bridge.

Quite naturally, nearly all poetry is elaborate harness that never smelled a real horse. How refreshing to find a book full of wild horses. The harness that contains their energies is a nearly invisible tracery, a spirit harness. Perhaps it is even a mistake to mention Zen, which is only a word people seem to trip over; rather they trip over false conceptions of Zen. They think of monks sitting around in a full lotus eating rice. This is like trying to visualize an entire, unknown body from a single hair. As an instance, Takahashi's poems can contain anger and profound sexuality.

THE PEACH

A little girl under a peach tree,

Whose blossoms fall into the entrails

Of the earth.

There you stand, but a mountain may be there

Instead; it is not unlikely that the earth

May be yourself.

You step against a plate of iron and half

Your face is turned to iron. I will smash

Flesh and bone

And suck the cracked peach. She went up the mountain

To hide her breasts in the snowy ravine.

Women's legs

Are more or less alike. The leaves of the peach tree

Stretch across the sea to the end of

The continent.

The sea was at the little girl's beck and call.

I will cross the sea like a hairy

Caterpillar

And catch the odour of your body.

There is a lovely humor in Takahashi that catches us unaware. At one moment we may be dwelling on a poem in which the poet wishes to give up his life for an ill wife, and at the next moment encounter a poem such as “Fish.”

FISH

I hold a newspaper, reading.

Suddenly my hands become cow ears,

Then turn into Pusan, the South Korean port.

Lying on a mat

Spread on the bankside stones,

I fell asleep.

But a willow leaf, breeze-stirred,

Brushed my ear.

I remained just as I was,

Near the murmurous water.

When young there was a girl

Who became a fish for me.

Whenever I wanted fish

Broiled in salt, I'd summon her.

She'd get down on her stomach

To be sun-cooked on the stones.

And she was always ready!

Alas, she no longer conies to me.

An old benighted drake,

I hobble homeward.

But look, my drake feet become horse hoofs!

Now they drop off

And, stretching marvelously,

Become the tracks of the Tokaido Railway Line.

Nothing is denied entrance into these poems: department stores, the atomic bomb, rats, clouds, Mars, stewardesses, helicopters, penguins, the Thames, trucks, strawberries, rain, dogs. All things are in their minutely suggestive proportion and given an energy we aren't familiar with, lost as most of us are in the romantic lie of the world as a confused extension of our personalities. The poet's stance is nimble and totally devoid of any of the usual crappy whining and self-pity the world habitually isolates as items in the poet's persona. Think how wonderful it would be if, when poets “mooned” over things, the verb would describe the dropping of the trousers rather than the usual Ichabod Crane trip.

Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto, the joint translators, present useful, occasionally brilliant, introductions. The introductions are extremely helpful, gates through which one enters the house of the book. Ikemoto, a profound Zennist himself, quotes Takahashi—"In short, confidence and action is all. One would present a sorry sight if one kept loitering, fascinated, within the fold of literature. True poetry is born out of the very despair that the word is useless and poetry is to be abandoned.” Stryk offers a marvelous Rilke quote that is peculiarly Zennist:

We play with obscure forces, which we cannot lay hold of, by the names we give them, as children play with fire, and it seems for a moment as if all the energy had lain unused in things until we came to apply it to our transitory life and its needs. But repeatedly . . . these forces shake off their names and rise . . . against their little lords, no, not even against—they simply rise, and civilizations fall from the shoulders of the earth . . . .

Perhaps it is our syncretist impulse, that Stryk notes in Rilke, that attracts us so strongly to Takahashi. He was an early Dadaist and that sneaks in. Some of the poems remind you of the lucidity of Rimbaud's Illuminations—all primary colors mixed with nouns, verbs and vision. There are no hedges or temples, grottoes, shrines. At times the impassivity disturbs us until we see the energy just barely contained by the skin of the poem. Afterimages has all the dangers owned by a considerable poetry when it implies a Code of Behavior. We shy away. Then return discomfited, with the simple eagerness we owned before we became so smart. We visit places in Takahashi that we once may have visited hastily in a dream, or in a moment too startling to record the perception. We had no equipment to catch it. The book engages and subsumes us. We become that perfectly vulnerable reader that any poet wishes for his work.

Part of the power must come from the fact that the poet has ten thousand centers as a Zennist, thus is virtually centerless. He is not defending a core known as Man Making Literature. All of this in a poet who thinks himself no better or worse than a quail.

QUAILS

It is the grass that moves, not the quails.

Weary of embraces, she thought of

Committing her body to the flame.

When I shut my eyes, I hear far and wide

The air of the Ice Age stirring.

When I open them, a rocket passes over a meteor

A quail's egg is complete in itself,

Leaving not room enough for a dagger's point.

All the phenomena in the universe: myself.

Quails are supported by the universe

(I wonder if that means subsisting by God).

A quail has seized God by the neck

With its black bill, because there is no

God greater than a quail.

(Peter, Christ, Judas: a quail.)

A quail's egg: idle philosophy in solution.

(There is no wife better than a quail.)

I dropped a quail's egg into a cup for buckwheat noodles,

And made havoc of the Democratic Constitution.

Split chopsticks stuck in the back, a quail husband

Will deliver dishes on a bicycle, anywhere.

The light yellow legs go up the hill of Golgotha.

Those quails who stood on the rock, became the rock!

The nightfall is quiet, but inside the congealed exuviae

Numberless insects zigzag, on parade.

1972