An infinity of light,
sun coming green
through the vertical blind:
a stand of spears rises like a temple,
the shafts struck deep in ancestral hearts.
Within the trees,
behind a rusted wide-runged fence
grey crooked gravestones
stick up like blackened teeth
from the darker lips of soil.
The glade thickens with birds,
of many kinds all loud and invisible.
They shift noisily unseen,
speaking in tongues that tell the tales of the dead
in the shaded complex geometry of bamboo.
Japan, 10/94