Poetry |

“After Reading Bashō, I Remember the Rain”

After Reading Bashō, I Remember the Rain

 

 

I found a quail’s nest under sage plants near the house

                        woven, I think, while we were traveling,

            & the yard seemed abandoned.

 

The hen burst out under a torrent of hose-water

                        I unknowingly sprayed into the leaves.

            Twelve perfect eggs!

 

Then days later beneath the variegated branches,

                        only shells. Small, each neatly broken

            in half. I spied the button-topped

 

babies ebbing & flowing after their parents

                        ranging through neighborhood, slalom-

            ing arbor vitae hedges, half-flying to shrubs,

 

in the waste-water ditch overgrowth, not back

                        to us. So many eggs someone once told me

            because birds are low on the food chain

 

but that is no comfort. When my mother was dying

                        in a hospice far away I was told to come quickly.

            Bad weather closed airports down the coast

 

rental cars gone & I slept on a bench in Port Authority

                        until a train finally delivered me on the day of her death,

            brother and father waiting on a rainy platform.

 

The living go on living; we visit the rooms of the dying,

                        one after another. My father, my dear old father,

            did not survive & like Bashō, he was tired at the end.

 

Tell me if we return to each other somehow. In bird song? Memory.

                        We waited for weeks for the quail to come back,

            walking softly over the gravel by the nest.

Contributor
Katharine Whitcomb

Katharine Whitcomb is the author of four collections of poems, including The Daughter’s Almanac (The Backwaters Press/University of Nebraska Press, 2014), chosen by Patricia Smith as the winner of The Backwaters Press Prize. Recent poems appear in Dialogist, Bennington Review, The Gettysburg Review, Tupelo Quarterly and Guesthouse. She teaches at Central Washington University and lives in Ellensburg, Washington.

Posted in Poetry

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.