Tsuchiya Koitsu: Ryuhashi at Night, Yanagibashi
Poets know how to linger in the world between
dreaming
and this consciousness we share.
By sharing it we feel safe to call this space
“Awake.”
Awake oh sleeper, and
Rise to the truth that artists and poets,
priests and prophets try to learn–
try to teach.
That Death is not real,
though your life might be, in fact, death.
Rise up from the dead.
Learn
the power of an interior life
the wisdom of action born in love
The eternity wrapped into this moment of goodness.
Who are you to say that Koitsu’s action of building homes on paper,
brush constructing brick,
mind moving toward some distant vanishing point
heart highlighting
the yellow of warm homes
peopled by gray shadows
under red Chinese Lanterns…
Who are you to say that, in time, his night won’t matter?
Does meaning fade like memories,
into the fog beyond this reality,
beyond his death and mine
and yours?
I say
your action of simply noticing
a world drawn by an artist
will wake up that which is sleeping in you.
You are the man rowing through a river of time, carrying a single lantern of light…
Soon you will join Tsuchiya and myself in that small houseboat. You will hang up your
light with ours and we will talk and paint, drink green tea and sake, and write poetry
together for 3, 456 years of friendship. How glad you must be that you paused, in this now,
between reading a Facebook post and your work emails, to meander into this poem.
