Tuesday poem #216 : Gerry Shikatani : HIKONE (Shiga Prefecture)

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.com

This 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