Variations on a Theme from Roy Fisher

I. North Kyoto, 24 June 2008 

Dear Roy 

I hesitate to say that I still exist, but 

something is sitting in this chair, 

and I cannot definitely identify it as 

other than me. So perhaps. I 

thought I would pass on this news. 

What militates against 

definite demarcation of self from other 

is that it is now 

the rainy season, when anything grows. 

Mould sprouts, fills cracks. I cannot with certainty say that I am that 

which is not mould. 

You will ask, 

How do computers work? do not the microscopic fibrillifications 

branch across from 

memory cell to memory cell, 

making it all one unified awareness and happy vacancy? 

Answer is, they are made in Japan. Where these things 

have been thought out from aforetime, 

for from aforetime they have kept down 

the jungle that sprouts between rice-fields, 

so that frogs may play in an ordered and demarcated environment 

benignly controlled by Man. 

II.

The massive slaughter of the superabundance of grasses on the field-banks, the farmers’

purifications in autumn

with all that therein lived, that hopped or crawled

white bandanna around forehead for the sweat,

pungent smoke rising

wispy white and grey ash, in small mounds;

the calm post-life:

the rounded banks, the trimm’d weeds

with the cricket sounding in his always-undetectable location

all of which is required

that the whole not return to even, high grass

tangled with sasa

where the banks had been, and where the rice was

which takes over when anyone dies,

for the offspring have gone off to Tokyo

and don’t return:

III.

Shed the mould,

along with the cells it grew on.

IV. 

Shed the computer 

and get a new one. 

Peter Makin was born in 1946, and educated at the local grammar school in Lincolnshire and at King's College, London. He taught in Mali, in England, and for many years in Japan, where he lived in a mountain valley north of Kyoto. His publications include critical books on Ezra Pound and Basil Bunting, and two collections of poems (Neck of the Woods and Tre Paesi) from Isobar Press. 

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