A gritty bench, a grubby river,
And an ongoing wave of wonderment:
How capable and amazing
Everything is, such people are,
Routinely erecting their
Rare dwellings here, with blazing
Blue pantiled roofs, fitted under a hot
And hazy ring of hills.
…So firmly rooted, yet so
Remote from me and a narrow,
Open-plotted upbringing
On a tucked away
Plain in southeast Michigan,
Even as, right here, they
Fashioned their unfigured lives,
Equally at home, equally tucked away.
I’m twenty-seven, maybe too old to be
Upended by this, the manifold
Foreignness of it all, the fulfilling
Glazed grandeur of it all,
But we each come into ourselves
As each can, in our own
Unmetered time (our own sweet way),
And for me this day’s more thrilling
Than, even now, I can express:
A Michigan boy, plunked down
In Japan—Kyoto, no less—
In the sun, on a bench, by a river.
To my adopted bench I’ve brought
A lunch all but miraculous
Even if bought
In a minimart much like
Any such shop back home.
Outfitted with free chopsticks
I can’t manipulate,
My first lunch in Japan consists
Of utterly raw fish,
And a minnowy plastic fish
Whose mouth squirts soy sauce,
And a translucent slice
Of pickled ginger, and a bed of rice,
Still cool (though my hands are sweaty),
Festooned with airy strips
Of dried seaweed,
like confetti,
And nearly forty years later
An exhausted plate of maguro
And unagi in a dive near Penn Station
Reawakes the past, the repast….
The seaweed is what does it.
The color does it (wine-dark,
The very hue wine would take
If wine were green),
Or the texture (dry but slippery),
Or its pungent distant scent
(Sun-blasted tidal flats,
Evaporated seas).
I’m sixty-six, and could anything
Reliably be more heartening
Than stray hints that life’s brightest events
Are, however far-flung, strung
Along a long old current? Than the presentiment
Of some vast, unglimpsed waterway
Where past and present
Dissolve in an enduring flux?
Dexterous chopsticks lift a block of maki
To my nose, as a here-and-now fades
And I’m closer than in decades
To our young man by the Kamo River.
It was a day in August. It was hot,
And I’d come to an ancient city
To contemplate a sun-splashed river
And an embaying ring of hills.
There are moments, slippery
And salvific, rare and pure
And paradoxical as old current,
When the wine turns green.
There are these moments,
A verdant vintage goes
To your head, unclouding a passage
Beyond this one on
A river that, having carried
Cargoes past human reckoning, invites
A further passenger. The lights
Shall be borne. And you be ferried.
______________________________
The Old Current by Brad Leithauser is available via Knopf.
