Three Poems from Robert MacLean’s new book Waking to Snow (Isobar Press, Oct. 2020)

 

My First Guide to Kyoto

Next-door neighbour’s
pug-nosed Sakura
tied up all day
whimpering beneath
the stairwell: no
way to treat the
earliest cherry blossoms

in Kyoto.
So I take him for a walk –
rather he takes me,
charging like a stunted
rogue elephant
to the Kamo river’s
ecstasy of in-

visible smells where
he poops three times, each
with more strain,
panting and slobbering as
he drags me along
at the end of his
taut leash. Oh

we’re sailing now
past some thin old folk
playing a kind of croquet
near the bridge in the ancient
newborn sun,
past some kids crouched
bouncing a ball and chanting,

past endless blocks of
jumbled houses,
blue-tiled roofs glinting
like dragon scales. By now,
Sakura’s zonked, able
to scrawl his faint
signature only at irresistible

spots, so we wend
our way home:
small dun dopey boggle-eyed
dog with fur
radiating in tufts,
deep gaze thank you
to each other.

 

 

Sweeping Leaves in the Cemetery at Ryōkō-in, 4 a.m.

Bamboo broom
stone lanterns
dead leaves

I’ve travelled
halfway around the world
to be here

 

 

Crickets

I hear the survivors
ancient & brittle
squatting in October light:

wizened black-
robed monks

chanting the sutra
of Earth-Beginning-to-Freeze
slower
each night.

*
empty exo-
skeletons

little huts
filling with snow

 

 

About the Author

Robert MacLean was born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. He lived in Kyoto for twenty-five years, where he taught at Ritsumeikan University, meanwhile continuing his lifelong zazen practice. He has studied and sat with Robert Aitkin Roshi and Joshu Sasaki Roshi and latterly at Tofukuji in Kyoto where Keidō Fukushima Roshi was abbot. He now lives in the North Okanagan, B.C. with a Renaissance viola da gamba, his wife Wakana, and ‘a luminous little girl Akane born on a snowy December morning, my resident Zen master.’

Waking to Snow is available in paperback from Amazon Japan and Amazon International outlets. If you’re in Tokyo, the book is available from Books Kinokuniya near the south exit of Shinjuku station.

 

(Feature photo of sunrise compliments of gratisography.com. All others Paul Rossiter at Isobar Press).