Music in the field

Mornings in Michigan, I would go out into the mist, looking for beauty.

I often found it there.

Nocturne

At night we read together in the big bed
that I love---yellow lamplight
spilled across our crossed limbs, hip
to thigh, exchanging passages aloud,
then subsiding once again into silence.

There is music in the field behind
our house. Some nights, even
in the day, it rises up on air, then recedes
into the earth. It comes and goes
like this, but is always there, concealed
in the waving grass.

Mari L'Esperance

The Darkened Temple, Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2008, page 78.

L'Esperance is a poet whose work I had not seen, until something called my attention to it the other day. This is a dynamite book! There are several threads that run through it: Japan and Japanese in World War II, her Japanese mother and the loss of this mother. The poems are strong, and very interesting, and can be understood with a reasonable effort. This is one of the simpler ones. There is one about Hirohito that I hope to nerve up enough to put on this blog very soon. Wars . . . . .