2009 © Robert L. Fisher
Through some miracle Haruki Ashikaga’s mulberry orchard survived the War, remaining intact within sight of the Sea of Japan, along the coast of Hyogo Prefecture. Even his modest home of thatch and stone faced the sometimes rough seas as resolutely as ever. Ashikaga was a poet who bound up his slender volumes with silk thread that he manufactured himself from the cocoons of silkworms. He raised silkworms on beds of mulberry leaves in great troughs in a shed under the trees. He boiled the cocoons and had a machine that unwound the silk filament, which he sold to support himself. But poetry was his real occupation, even though he made little effort to share it with others. He had tried offering his tomes at the railway station, asking only a few yen to cover the cost of paper and silk thread. He did not feel his time was worth anything. But even at this price commuters hurried past his table, barely noticing his neat stacks of handmade books.
Never before in her history had Japan been in such dire need of poetry. Almost every household grieved over the loss of sons and husbands, some yet unburied in far-off lands and on islands in the Pacific, others were maimed and dying of fever, while yet others, old people and children, lay under the rubble and ashes of vast cities. Although not always consciously known or admitted, under the nation ran subterranean rivers of shame for atrocities, much of it sadism hidden behind a hollow samurai code. Everyone was determined to look away. Ashikaga’s poetry was a wail of pain, but if people thought of poetry at all they wanted empty, pretty haiku about cherry blossoms.
One day on the beach Ashikaga came across schoolboys tormenting a cat. They had worked themselves up into a fury, and one boy had already drawn a penknife. Ashikaga burst into their circle and swept up the terrified animal. The boys were frozen in their stances, huffing, teetering on the edge of pulling the old man down and stabbing him. Ashikaga was breathing heavily, too, but from the emphysema that had kept him out of the Imperial Army. He walked steadily toward his cottage, and the moment passed.
Inside he held the cat and fed it pieces of fish after carefully removing the tiniest bones. Then he placed the cat on a quilt where it curled up and fell asleep. The boys had not run away. Instead, they were watching through the window in silence.
Ashikaga brought out a sheet of paper and began writing with his brush:
The sea weighs more,
Heavy with our sins,
Shaking the shore,
Grinding rock into sand.
I feel small and afraid,
But here is someone even smaller.
See how he trembles before my blade!
The boat-builder bends oak
With fire and steam,
Bends planks into curves
Sleek in the spray.
Parents bend their children
Into sturdy boats,
But they come apart at the seams,
And are bent back.
Our anger poisons the soil,
Poisons the tree and its fruit.
This is why the bird’s song
Is hoarse in its flaming throat.
Ashikaga pinned the poem to the window frame. The boys read it and took it away with them.
That night the cat jumped on his bed and curled up in the crook of his arm.
In the morning Ashikaga was about to inspect his silkworms squirming on their beds of mulberry leaves, when he saw on the table next to the window a section of bamboo to which were tied with twine several small papers. He cut the twine and found that each paper was a haiku from one of the boys. One haiku read:
Even on land the high seas make me quake.
In my hands a cat,
Crying as I did in the cradle.
Haruki Ashikaga raised his silkworms, sold their thread, wrote his poetry. His cottage is gone. The present owners of the mulberry orchard, which is now closer to the sea, remember Ashikaga and his books of poetry.
“Years ago the Prefecture decided to place those concrete tetrapods — that’s what the engineers called them — along the coast to stop erosion. Ashikaga and his cottage? Out there under the concrete, there could be almost anything.”
Aurelio Oroñoz was born and raised in Montevideo, Uruguay, where he attended university and spent endless hours in cafés discussing poetry and literature with his fellow students. He was unique in insisting that politics, ideology and literature, especially poetry, should never mix. He was essentially a lyric poet concerned with the human condition, the stages of life and the search for meaning.
In the 1930s many young men in his circle journeyed to Spain to fight for the Republic in the Civil War. Oroñoz bided his time. In 1942 he volunteered to join the United States Army and fought his way from Sicily, up the boot of Italy, across France and into Germany. It was there in 1945 that he was part of a force that liberated a Nazi death camp. This experience forever changed him. He became speechless.
Although he was given American citizenship at the end of the War, Oroñoz elected to return to Uruguay, where he took up residence along the wild, stormy Atlantic coast.
He never wrote directly about the Holocaust, not in essays or in stories and certainly never in poetry. He recounted his experience once to his friends and that closed the subject. No one dared ask him again about what he had seen. It was, in any event, written on his face. He used to say that the only way he could write about the Holocaust would be to assemble blank pages, bind them into a book and give it a title. He hoped that the continual Atlantic winds would clear his mind of the images that tormented his waking hours as much as his sleep. He saw the Holocaust as an incontrovertible demonstration of what human beings are capable of. He also thought that once industrialized death had been implemented it was only a matter of time until it became a commonplace of history.
He spoke very little. What gave meaning to his life was writing poetry. Yet his poetry was haunted and brooding, for he was unable to believe the sum total of kindness, love and compassion even came close to outweighing meanness, hatred and intolerance. The Soviet Union summed up everything that was crushing the human spirit. The ocean, the Moon, the continents, the atmosphere and the birds migrating in it were all indifferent to man’s fate.
During this period in his life he wrote the following poem:
Goddamned paltry words!
I want to punch you with my fist
And kick you,
But you are too bloodless to bleed.
I am an ape whooping and flailing its arms,
Looking skyward in perplexity.
Cover, cover, cover
The corpse-things in the pit.
White sails against red sky,
Ship heeling.
Sand pipers standing on inverted sandpipers
On wet beach.
Lighthouse beam sweeping the twilight.
In the Atacama the wind moves not,
The sand dunes move not,
Nor the scorpion.
The silence of deep space.
Stars boiling, explosions,
Burning fury,
Yet no sound,
Nothing.
In the great capitals of the West
Audiences are weeping
To symphonies.
He tried embracing life. He planted a colorful garden. He established an animal hospital in his home, where he was always surrounded by birds chirping and animals following him around. He watched them hobble, then slowly heal. When they were strong enough he released them back into the wild.
But what saved him from despair was a woman who had survived a death camp. She too had ceased speaking. He held her in his arms and let her sob. He kissed the tattoo on her arm. Gradually she became part of his household and they shared the daily duties of cooking and laundry and cleaning. She began to speak.
When he held her he felt a deep void in her where once had been her parents and her children. He felt it and tried to fill it each day with wordless caresses, with kindnesses, with his presence.
When she held him she felt a pain that was sapping his will to live. She treated the wound by singing to him, and when she sang he too sobbed until the wound closed, with a scar, but closed nonetheless.
They started a school and he wrote poems about how children wonder at the world
III
Black Dawn
Robert Gildersleeve in the 1920s and 1930s found himself, storm-tossed or at loose ends, in what could still be called in those days The Mysterious East. Despite the gunboats, warlords, opium, farm-girl prostitutes, bound feet and treaty ports, the Orient clung to vestiges of elaborate courtesy, the songs of birds and crickets, gardens as islands of tranquility, and poetry — poetry sung as ballades, sung by courtesans, poetry flowing from brushes that barely lifted from the paper, poetry recited and then capped by a friend or lover, poetry that every schoolboy knew and which broke your heart. It was worth learning Chinese, the classical language that is, for this heritage.
China became unlivable, and Gildersleeve drifted to the archipelago of Japan. He found a land of generations talking past one another, yet everyone appreciated poetry, even those turning themselves into machines, often death machines. Finally Japan too became unlivable and Gildersleeve found himself in the American navy as a Japanese interpreter. Admiral Halsey and General MacArthur both drank and smoked with him.
After the War, Gildersleeve took advantage of the GI Bill to attend university, but not to study anything to do with the Far East, except tangentially; instead, he became a clinical psychologist, and some would say he buried himself in a remote part of America, shunning his connections and career opportunities.
Gildersleeve took a job with the Public Health Department of Island County, Washington, that is, a county north of Seattle whose territory consisted of one gangly, narrow island and one more compact island. After the Pacific, Gildersleeve was used to islands and atolls, but here sun was the exception. Yet he preferred the rain and fog, the dense forests and smell of pine.
His clients were almost entirely Japanese-Americans who were heavy drinkers, if not alcoholics. His days were spent in his car, driving from farm to farm, fishing port to fishing port, talking to his soft-spoken patients, or rather, listening to them. Some spoke Japanese, but some rustic dialect from a hundred years ago, which made Gildersleeve smile. Their words and turns of phrase endeared these men to him. Ironically, they were more American than he was, since they had lived their lives entirely on these two islands, whereas he was not sure who he was anymore. He liked to play softball with them.
Oddly enough — very oddly indeed — he rarely roved in memory along the Bund in pre-War Shanghai with its nightclubs and exotic mix of displaced Russians and exiled Englishmen and adventurers from every continent; or along the streets of Central District in Hong Kong with its double-decker trams and steep alleys; or across the mountainous interior of China with its muddy roads clogged with refugees and their wheelbarrows laden with bedding and children; or to dusty Peking and its camel caravans of teetering loads; or the operas with the old men singing along during the arias, the children chasing each other underfoot, all sticky with candy and the mothers yelling for the vendors to throw hot towels their way. Nor did he explore his memories of Japan: watching from the sweltering onzen as snow falls in big wobbling flakes in the rock garden; in a mountain temple at dawn chanting sutras and then the simple breakfast, as if floating about the turmoil of the crowded cities; the powdered women in bright kimonos; the hot sake burning its way down the throat; or the nō dramas with their eerie flute and their otherworldly voices. Stranger still, he did not dwell on the coral seas and their fish, each one of which seemed to be hand-painted by a master; the dazzling beaches and the coconuts so like human heads; the schooners taking on copra and the missionaries walking down the gangplank with their Bibles and stern looks; outriggers heading fearlessly out to sea, the rowers singing; the pigs roasting in covered pits.
He thought most about his hometown, dirty with industry and coal dust in the air; about the tough bars packed with men in overalls; about the clanking of mile-long trains unseen in the night; about night shifts and black men going home at dawn, while white folks were getting up and having coffee before heading out on the day shift; about strikes and union halls; about taking courses at night school and the hope of getting a better life.
Gildersleeve was a poet of the working people, the people he grew up with, went to school with, and left behind. In one way or another he wrote about the grandfather who raised him, the machinist who stood on his feet all day in front of a lathe. One of Gildersleeve’s poems is called “Night Watchman”:
Night has dawn by the throat,
Holding her under a black lagoon.
The wind would bring death if it could,
Howling down the frozen wasteland.
My uniform says I should be haranguing peasants
From the balcony of the Presidential Palace.
And my hat is heartbreaking,
Like Laertes’ goat-skin cap
As the suitors eat up his substance
And Penelope weaves his shroud.
Our lunchroom is lit like a container port,
The table legs are uneven,
The reading amounts to legal notices,
And the vending machine hums just to annoy us.
We gossip, we joke, talk about nothing in a colorful way,
Speculate, then go our separate ways,
Rattling doorknobs,
Swishing disinfectant in urinals,
Polishing miles of linoleum corridors.
Now a distant glow-worm crawls toward me.
Inside, the faces, mostly brown and black,
Of men and women swallowed alive.
My vinyl bag holds a cold thermos
And heavy-soled shoes, for we stand shift after shift.
Before I too am swallowed,
Let my hand reach for dawn’s throat
That I might strangle her.
For Gildersleeve today’s rain was real, the man’s struggle with the bottle was real, the solace he gave the man was real. The rest was a detour.
IV
Belly Gunner
In 1942 Lorne Bryce of Fayette, West Virginia, joined the United States Army Air Forces and was almost immediately sent to England for training. Because of his height, only five feet six inches, he was assigned to be a belly gunner, or more elegantly, a ball turret gunner, on a B-17 Flying Fortress.
He mastered the care and operation of his two 50-inch machine guns. The night before a bombing run he would put socks over the guns to keep the oil warm, so that at high altitude the guns would function smoothly. Over the English Channel he would climb into his Plexiglas sphere, set up his guns and for up to seven hours man his guns and swivel the turret thousands of feet above the cities and countryside of Germany, both in the day and at night. The space was so cramped that the one way he could operate the triggers was by an intricate system of cords and pulleys.
He saw Luftwaffe fighters enter the red lines on his reticle and pulled the cords. His bullets sawed off a wing or cut across the fuselage, and he watched the pilots rip off the canopy and dive into space. He saw Messerschmidts with cannon timed to fire through their props shoot rounds into the Plexiglas bubble at the front of a B-17, shredding the pilots and navigators. He barely had time to register the fires and destruction that rolled like a tidal wave across the factories and neighborhoods far below.
Once over the English Channel, headed home, he climbed out of his cocoon, stretched his limbs and sometimes found daylight shining through innumerable holes, some small and neat, others jagged and gaping.
In 1946 Bryce was discharged and returned to Fayette. Outwardly not much had changed. He re-opened his machine shop where he repaired combine harvesters, tractors, even crop dusters. Yet everything was different, perhaps because so many people had been forced to leave their familiar towns to fight in the Pacific or in Europe, or take up factory jobs in big cities.
On summer evenings he sat on his front porch sipping whiskey and listening to the crescendos and diminuendos of the locusts in big old trees that lined his dusty street. Fireflies danced in the humid air. His hands trembled. Had he actually watched great cities burn? Had he for three years flown just out of the reach of flak, the airbursts rumbling beneath his sphere like a rough road? Had he seen almost every fourth bomber break formation and dive suddenly in flames toward that alien land far below?
The evangelical church where he had spent his youth singing hymns and that had formed the center of his world now seemed like a rundown but quaint old wooden building, no match for what he had seen. He still went to church, mostly for the singing and the Bible readings.
Bryce told himself that he was dying, gasping for air, lost and all that separated him from death and despair was the hymns. He took his drink inside, switched on the light over the kitchen table and began writing on whatever paper he could find — the backs of old months from the calendar — with great urgency. He read it and muttered, “I don’t know if you’re a country song or a hymn, but I’ll call you ‘Hymn No. One’.”
The road is steep and narrow,
And my legs are weak.
On all sides devils urge me
To rest, to sleep,
But the sun is already low.
Sweet Jesus, take me upon your shoulders,
Broad and confident,
High above the incessant demons!
And lo, Jesus took me up.
His strides were long and easy,
He carried me like a papoose.
He set me down on the mountaintop,
And in every direction was dense green.
Here and there rose in straight, thin lines
The smoke of cookfires.
I saw a vast field of golden wheat,
And each ear had a human face.
Jesus wielded his great scythe
And he cut down a million stalks.
A wind came up,
Blowing the wheat high in the air,
While the chaff fell earthward.
The grains, each a soul, shot like comets
Into the firmament,
Each became a star.
The human chaff fell into the outstretched aprons
Of mothers and sisters and grandmothers.
Jesus stooped and blew the chaff aloft,
And a river of dust arose
And swirled across the Milky Way.
Down below, at every farmstead,
Cooks hammer bars of iron,
Calling their menfolk in from the fields.
© 2009 Robert L. Fisher
