April 11
Just then a thousand lights
white, pink-tinged and small.
Heart turned, bowels churned
at footstep. In the lake waters too
snowtuft blossoms luminous.
April night, bright
ramen shops others,
metal-shuttered
to dark, streets
and street-crossings held these eyes
Hikone.
______________________________________________
ramen, Japanese adaptation of
Chinese-style noodle soup
*
castle’s mirror
sakura sea Lake
Biwa
father’s young wide eyes
stare out at the Pacific.
*
Leafs’ Opening Day - ballgame
Pop waited at our school’s door,
both Al and I hurrying
down the halls.
*
Last night bright
grilled Omi-gyu --
now, Pop’s hashi
over hot frying pan
frozen decades ago.
….
sliced paper-thin
Pop’s Friday night beef
sukiyaki, yakiniku
electric frying pan our sizzling teppan
my eyes nothing now
but his ashes.
_______________________________________________
Sakura:cherry
blossom(s)
Omi-gyu, breed of beef cattle from Omi
(Shiga Prefecture)
hashi, chopsticks
yakiniku, iron-griddled beef
teppan, iron griddle
*
skiff moored still to shore
as if a boatman
never returns.
On My Late Father’s Birthday
MacDo yet again, Birthday-boy
with this bossa nova Quiet Nights
and Quiet Stars, heart
in this Hikone-shi,
coffee
to pack the punch B-boy on
your B-day. What did he call it..
Hinatsu-san, bon-san…?
That jazz - soothes here
as over the eki the low
ridges,
forests of conifers are veiled
melancholic oyster gray,
pure light hinting at base. Sundays
B-boy used to make all the summer
evening smell fine with perk coffee
to fill
the thermos for your lunch and
maybe Stan’s Amphora tobacco-filled
pipe
on the porch. MacDo’s and now Imagination
tunes Japan a cool hit. Cool those
mornings, less the hot sticky
evenings
on Ross Street, downtown T.O., must have
been too
for dear ol’ Dad, near the end of
night shifts
sweeping, polishing, The Mercury
All-Night
Restaurant’s fine woody, earthy brew
poured from those tall stainless urns
still gleam, the suited prim
salarymen of T.O.
banks, The Permanent, ready to
walk those floors
he swept clean.
Hikone-shi:
Hikone- (suffix identifying it as city, i.e. Hikone City)
Hinatsu-san, (O)bon-san: Mr. Hinatsu-(a term of respect) , nourable priest
eki, train station
Stan:
eldest brother of the poet
The Permanent: trust company
*
It is Sunday afternoon in Hikone.
Around the trail to calm, return
Sunday, through scatterd rain:
cool, soft leisure of strollers
they, hearts are light. In this
exact centre, sakura now
blossomed
draping out, to hear pounding
dance beat amplified, getting louder
from approach. Such silence that
stirs
hip Hikone kids, arms flailing
the atchi-kochi dance,
exact heart.
It is Sunday afternoon.
atchi-kochi, here-there
Gerry Shikatani is founder and director of
Lorca’s Granada: writers’ retreat, colloquia and workshops set in the Andalusian city that was home to the great poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca. Since the early 1970’s Shikatani’s oeuvre has included poetry, visual and sound composition/performance, short fiction, editing, and film collaborations. His books include the 412 page collection
Aqueduct (1996),
mortar rake glove sausan broom basin sansui (First Book,
Three Gardens of Andalucia), and with co-editor David Aylward,
Shoji – Paper Doors, an anthology of Japanese-Canadian poetry (in English and Japanese, 1981). As an international culinary critic and food/travel writer, he is an authority on Spanish gastronomy and recipient of
Spain’s Officer’s Cross in the Order of Civilian Merit, granted by King Juan Carlos. He is based in Ontario and Spain.
www.gerryshikatani.comThis poem is taken from
mortar rake glove sausan broom basin sansui (Second Book, niwa) still in progress.
the Tuesday poem is curated by
rob mclennan
