Into the Country

(mountain road, Iya, Japan)

by Stephen Bridge

 

Being new here, we stomp around,

bellowing our right to step on their earth.

Our footsteps clang, like dampened gongs 

along a narrow mountain road,

dampened by the liquid darkness

of this ancient piece of the world.

 

A withered woman starts at the sound

of our drunken staccato laughter

and our freakish English voices.

She cowers behind a thin sliding door,

thinking that we’ve come for her,

but we just want the waterfall and pool.

 

We plunge in, shrinking our scalps

in the icy, pounding shower; kicking up

thousands of miniature mineral stars

that flash and vanish promise in moonlight

against their murky, black water sky;

then we shiver in dripping, silt-filled jeans.

 

The innkeeper gives chase, trying to remove

a Western woman’s mud-caked shoes;

he runs, arms outstretched, bent forward

like an angry goose, fending off a rival

and when his caretaking hands touch her feet,

she, misunderstanding, shrieks and leaps.

 

The mountain draws our swimming swirl

down its stony vertebrae, down its body

into the rice fields of the country, and

an old man squatting beside the creek

gently, silently lifts his bamboo dipper,

letting our stirred-up mud flow past.

(originally published in  “Postcards from Roadkillville.”) 

 

You Rail

by Stephen Bridge

 

Tying a shoelace of conversation,

you invariably start tentatively,

but the opposite interlocutor

fails to complete either loop

or even slide in either foot,

not cottoning to your knot.

After all, you can twist it in

a Möbius directional idiom,

emerge on another other side

that no soul comes to find.

It just goes all iron on you,

rigid then magically pliable,

bending itself up at the end

into a railway’s endless rail

for stopping runaway ideas

that never take that track.

Then you thread intricate

blue loops on a whiteboard,

but no one swims through

the open swirling waves

of their greener meanings.

After they clip their minds

back together and file out,

you gently peel off a strand,

which has now transformed

into a possibly-ready piece

of cosmic pasta that you hurl

wallward, yet it never sticks,

never even reaches the wall.