The Unattainable Coppery-tailed Trogon \ The Narrow Road

Nancy: This bird, now even less attainable, having had its name changed to Elegant Trogon, lives on in my mind, half real, half myth, always beyond reach.

The Unattainable Coppery-tailed Trogon

Sometimes it’s just a matter of altitude.

Or luck.  Worn out by Onion Pass, camping too high,

not knowing that Spring was straight down

where the snow melted and fell into Cave Creek.

Sometimes it’s a matter of attitude,

of settling for easy bookish beasts and lame archetypes,

or of never being in the right place

to catch the Ravens in their Spring.

Black birds seen in the looking glass

are less real than my Trogon,

which I have called unattainable,

but which is truly there, calling from tree to tree

in a canyon which I could find, given luck

and another Spring.

Alan: I offer homage to Basho, after reading The Narrow Road To The Interior (aka The Narrow Road To The Deep North) in translation.

The Narrow Road

Anxious before each Barrier,

at Shitomae Basho finds delay,

the guards “suspicious, slow

and thorough.”  A three-day

pounding storm: refuge

a guard-shack with its lice

and fleas: “Now the horse

beside my pillow pees,” an amber

torrent, soaking stinking

straw.

            No wonder “the old

infirmities return”: fever,

weakness, and the fear of death

on that narrow, interior path.

And at each stage a thousand

years whisper to you, or moan,

in grass, under water, or in stone,

and a country as if made by gods calls forth

these poems wherein we watch you

pause at that gateless gate

then step through,

vanishing

into light.