The Tanka Trilogy

Part One

“Snowmelt”

 

Clear waters unchanged

in a meadow

I saw long ago:

Will you remember

this face of mine?

 

Saigyo (1118-1190)

My “home” prison lies at the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, near the edge of Lake Erie, and every winter our friendly neighbor Canada sends us generous helpings of it’s surplus snow. When it reluctantly melts in the spring, temporary snowmelt pools appear in the depressions of the poorly graded lawns, creating magic mirrors in which clouds may swim, birds fly, and an old man can contemplate the toll exacted by yet another year away from his family. 

 

Although mirrors never lie, memory often does. As the tarnished stainless steel mirror above the sink reminds me every day, I have changed during my twelve-year incarceration. Yet my memory–an unreliable witness–tells me otherwise. To it, my hazy reflection is still that of the ten-year-old boy sailing empty mustard jars down the sheep pasture creek, the carefree lad urging with a stick their fitful progress as they plummet over tiny waterfalls, bob through timid rapids, and occasionally become entrapped in stream-bend eddies. 

 

That boy, prodding with a willow switch the laggards back into the current, no longer exists. His cloud-framed image atop the water, embossed upon the blue sky background of an eternal summer day, survives only in his memory, and soon even that evanescent snapshot will begin to fade into that inevitable oblivion where all things must eventually pass.

 

Sometimes when my cellie is away, I turn off the radio and think about my life. I was born a Gemini–an air sign–but my boyhood heart was stolen by the naiades, the happy-go-lucky water sprites who mocked the hermit frog in the tin roofed spring for sitting zazen on his mossy stone instead of frolicking with them among the sunshot spears of watercress and duckweed. On the August day that I followed the brook to it’s upstream source deep into the “Big Woods” behind our farm, I thought I glimpsed them escorting my reflection from pool to pool, darting amidst glittery schools of frightened minnows until the creek narrowed to a rivulet, then a mere thread, and finally plunged underground on a rocky hillside, carrying with it as a souvenir of it’s faithful lover the shimmery likeness of my face.

 

Baffled by the unsettling dichotomy between perception and reality, I get up to peer in the mirror. Why, I muse, do we invariably perceive ourselves as we were decades before? Why don’t we see ourselves as others see us? Why does seventy-one-year-old me see a thirty-eight-year-old version of myself, a man who upon looking into a similar mirror would probably witness an eighteen-year-old boy delivering a cocky wink? And will I, should I live to a hundred, in my senility see in another mirror my ten-year-old self grinning back, blissfully happy and in love with a world that will never, ever, permit it’s favored son to grow old?

 

A harsh buzzer disturbs my reverie; yard is over; my cellie will soon return. Two hours later on my way to chow, perhaps I’ll catch a fleeting glimpse of my weary reflection in a snowmelt pool. Then I’ll silently thank the inept landscapers whose shoddy grading created these vernal mirrors. They reflect the illusions I long to see, and their visual blarney strengthens me for another season.

 

And if I’m fortunate, perhaps some day after I too have vanished from this world, someone whom I once dearly loved will gaze into a still pool in some faraway meadow to see my ghostly face smiling over their shoulder. 

Part Two

“Blossoms”

 

Will someone,

at the scent of cherry blossoms,

think of me

when I too

am a person of long ago?

 

Fujiwara No Shunzei (1114-1204)

I lost my sense of smell after suffering a drunken fall in 2006, the year before I came to prison. Yet last night in a lucid dream, I smelled my grandmother’s distinctive perfume. Even though she had died in 1972, and had not appeared in my dream, when I awake I sense her presence. I sit up on my bunk, look about the darkened cell, and pray that her restive soul has not returned from whichever lucky world it now enriches to witness her favorite grandchild’s precipitous fall from society’s grace, or worse, her esteem. 

 

Slanted stripes of diffused light from the outside light towers fall upon the shadowed wall, crosshatch the form of my sleeping cellie. In the profound silence, I think of Granny, my dead parents, and all the other departed souls who once loved me, and am thankful that they aren’t alive to behold my present disgrace. Then I think of the living–my three daughters and grandchildren–who are witness to my undoing, and I am overcome with late-night despair: Here come those old 3 a.m. dark-hour-of-the-soul blues again. 

 

Unable to sleep, beset with guilt, I remember how I attended each of my grandchildren’s births (despite fleeing into the hallway at the critical moments), and was the first person after the doctor, nurse, and mother to hold them in my arms, christening their tiny faces with involuntary tears of pride and joy. The oldest girl was nearly eight when our lives were suddenly torn asunder, and now I wonder if the autumnal perfume of woodsmoke and the sweet summer fragrance of new-mown grass conjure up fond memories of me, or does she recall with distaste the reek of spilt beer, stale cigarette smoke, and the double-barreled stench of an overflowing litter box and an old man’s chronic flatulence in my unkempt farmhouse?

 

I cringe at the memory, grateful that no one sees me blush with relived shame. All of those things–and worse–were the actions of another man, a man who no longer exists. That person is now as dead as his Granny, replaced by a reformed doppelganger anxious for a new trial, vindication, the right to die a free man. But even if that trifecta of wishes were to occur, what then of all the not-so-good memories already forged, what of the foul odors imprinted upon my grandchildren’s impressionable minds? Will someday a chance madeleine-whiff remind them of the outdoorsy aroma of a cut-on-our-farm cedar Christmas tree hung with homemade ornaments, or will they merely recall the stink of their grandfather’s past bad habits?

 

With a sigh, I lie down and drift back to sleep. Morning count is hours away, time enough to dream of persons of long ago, who perhaps are dreaming of me. 

Part Three

“Wild Geese”

 

When the wild goose

has flown far off

beyond the mountain,

its companion, left behind,

will surely cry

 

Minamoto No Sanetomo

(1192-1219)

Because it is an eight hundred-mile round trip from my daughters’ homes to this prison, I have not had a visit for over six years. As a result, my memory of the time before my prelapsarian fall struggles to stay afloat, feverishly treading the Lethean waters that would engulf it. Not only did I lose my freedom, most of my material possessions, and a considerable inheritance when I was imprisoned at the age of sixty–a man whose only prior conviction was a twenty-four-year-old DUI–I lost physical contact with my three daughters and their very young children, who at the time of my downfall ranged in age from two and a half to almost eight. On the day of my undoing, my oldest daughter watched in teary consternation as I was taken away in a police car. At the time, I was too stunned to cry myself, but after the shock wore off the next day, I wept bitterly too. God only knows what my grandchildren felt, but through my own experience I know that pain is not quantitative, it’s degree hardly computable, it just is, and we the afflicted must somehow bear it. And our tears lubricate our passages through difficult straits. 

 

I lived in the country for most of my life, and each of my many springs was accompanied by the welcome arrival of Canada geese. The incessant early March quacking, piping, and trilling of mating wood frogs, spring peepers, and chorus toads in the creekside swamp next to my home provided the basso and soprano voices of the annual opera, while high above the passing geese sang the two-note baritone theme. The performance ran for weeks on end, until the next generation of singers were spawned. 

 

In memorable years, a pair of geese would nest in the marsh, their mournful dirges stilled until autumn, where upon departing their friendly summer quarters for far-flung destinations at the nether end of the continent they would cry a last farewell. Watching them leave, a small part of my soul yearned to go with them, soar off into the morning sun, my troubles left behind. But then I would think of my family, and allow the foolish thought to pass. 

For how could I ever voluntarily deprive myself of their love?

 

Here at my “modern” prison, whose one and two-story buildings are divided by spacious lawns, there are no frogs or toads, no mature peepers piping from the crowns of the distant oaks. There are, however, plenty of geese; both the year round residents that waddle about in brazen gaggles, defecating at will, and their migratory relatives who like to drop in for noisy chats with their sedentary cousins. They all share the same tongue, the one that I mastered at an early age: the universal language of nostalgia.

 

They are my friends, these geese, and I obtain pleasure from their casual joie de vivre, their untroubled existence reassures every sentient being that happiness is his or her birthright too.

 

When they fly away to unknown shores, I sometimes fantasize that the western wind will bear them eastward, over my daughters’ homes. If so, I think, perhaps my little grandchildren playing in their yards will hear their mournful cries, look upwards, ask one another if geese ever fly over their Grandpa’s new home, and for a few moments think happy thoughts of a lonely old man who often cries for those left behind. 

The end.