June

The family farms are being kneaded with fresh soil and nourished with warm rain. The rice paddies are like a mirage between homes, and reflect the white fog above blue tile roofs.

A student brings me cucumbers from her garden.
A wooden tori on the mountain soaks in cedar sky-water as if it were a living tree and not a living symbol (it is both). Behind the tori clouds are loose between layers of blue mountain 
stretching apart so that yellow sun blinks in June's green. June is a pure month. A calm month. A sugar blue-lavender month.
When the sun goes down, the river and its little canals are full with croaking from Nagano’s new frogs. Their sound blends with the heavy air and fills my ears and eyes as I breathe in the hot dark.
The frogs make me wonder if the summer will bring lightning bugs to Nagano City. I think they'd like it here.

'squitoes

The mosquitoes are here.

Riding my bicycle
at the river,
they tick off my skin -
tiny sand-stone soldiers
in blanket swarms
falling away from my arms
and face
in the moist wind.

I narrow my eyes
and close my lips
when I see
the dot-cloud
but more often
I don’t see
until I am inside.
Ti-ti-ti-tic-ti-tic
Ti-ti-tic soft pin-
prick scratches
and then
the breeze.

Spring milk

Japanese milk is butter soft
like the plush beef cows,
fed wheat-beer
treated to massage
and to music.

The milk is creamier in winter,
I learn from my friend.
The milk is creamier because
the cows keep their fat.

After I know
I can taste:

Spring milk -
creamy still
but faster
off the tongue.

june is the season of rain.
the season of tulips and hydrangea.
it is the season of colorful umbrellas
popped open at the first grey cloud.

summer will be the cicada season
whose song will make the wet heat
even hotter

in our ears and in our hair.
our cheeks will be red

with the buzzing locust noise.

autumn was the egg season.
the full moon season.
the season of the soft boiled egg

between two burger patties
an oozing yellow moon mingling with teriyaki and lettuce.
there used to be a ceremony, a holiday that grandparents remember.
now autumn is the season of eggburgers.

and june - june june june - is the season of tulips and typhoons.
i imagine maniacal wind blowing the little people
clutching umbrellas and shopping bags,
lifting them off the sidewalk and shuffling them all over the street -
a neat seastorm of umbrellas red and blue and black and yellow pokadot
flying around nagano city, high school girls trying to keep

their hair dry and skirts down
and the salarymen with flailing briefcases trying to smoke cigarettes in mid air.
the wind and the umbrellas and all the bicycles

and small cars and tiny dogs
and leaves and flower petals and fresh soil all mingled together
at an airborne june cocktail party where everyone is friends in the wind
and soaked in the rain despite their umbrellas and raincoats.
perhaps everyone will laugh and ask for more beer
which will float over in tulips red and orange and yellow

and june will last forever and nagano will never dry.

pine-stone steps: the forest shrine in hakuba

A stone staircase rises from the wooden tori
skinny and winding like in an old Victorian home.
Polished cedar floors are forest dirt
the vibrant rugs: patches of wet green moss -
baby tears in the front yard of my childhood home.
The walls are pine
whose wrinkled bark can tell a thousand stories
in the spacious living room.

There is that clear
champagne fizz feeling.
This is a holy place, a quiet-tree place
and we step lightly
for this is where
some spirits live.

At the top there is a wooden shrine and there is a young pine,
thin and fresh and in no hurry to grow tall but without fear of its future.
Thick sponge moss
moist and rich like the finest earth water
blankets the ground
and a few brown mushrooms
have grown to half its height.

I kneel and breathe in the little tree.

Then we turn
and begin walking down
the stone steps
our noses wet from the clear cold.
We watch our feet
so as not to stumble
over a tree’s root -
a rug folded up on one end.