This is an adaptation of the final scene of my second book. The book will never be finished in the usual sense. Not sure how or if we could use this. Its a parody of the voiceover from the Tamasaburo Kabuki plays/dances on youtube, and a parody of my own earlier style as a slightly romantic, blood and tears writer. Again, an avoidance of an 'immediate' expression, on my part. A parody of the search for artistic truth and origin.
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Tamasaburo asked the way to the river whilst still on the boat, and was directed to the empty grey ash path in front of him. The sun had risen, but it was unseen, hidden behind a thick low covering of cloud that obliterated the peaks above. He thought the river would be close to the road, couldn’t imagine Hopkin’s in the difficult landscape, the scrawny poet-priest’s soutane slapping against him as he traversed the same bleak path a century before. The poet had come with a companion, a guide, Tamasaburo imagined, walking the road and distracting him, Hopkin’s not listening, smiling but internally appalled by the horror of the raw and seeping nature before him. And then the scene changing in the poet’s inscape, his perspective shifting as the dark, brumal groin in the landscape became a tabernacle, the river becoming biblical; an Edenic stream flowing from his feet.
Tamasaburo could hear the river in the distance, the sound of a constant exhalation, an increasing exultation as he moved towards the unseen source, the words from the poem he had written for the poet folded in his pocket, rising in his mind.
Come springtime my heart leaps,
as I go to view the flowers,
where, by mountain hamlets,
the valley river roars with a noise like rainfall,
drowning out the wind blowing through the pines.
There seemed no evidence of spring or him here yet, the season, like everything, still undecided, early spring or late autumn.
Adorn yourself and follow,
for their faces are made-up in colours, red, white and pink.
How enchanting! How enchanting!
Blossoms of just forteen days.
But no colour here, the black of his usual garb making Tamasaburo appear like a decaying black tree moving, unnatural, over the landscape. And then the copied, twisted and inverted words of his own poem, written on the back of the first, answering his own love letter.
Winter comes, my heart in hiding,
as I walk over the barren fields,
where, by mountain villages,
the river roars by with the sound of an unseen storm,
drowning the cruel wind that moans through the branches.
The falls had come into view and were nothing like how he desired them to be – a japonist Victorian iron parabola spanned the river, conquering the fast flowing water beneath, tidily channelling the chthonic tumult. He mounted the bridge and his eyes darted along the path on the other side until it appeared to end, suspended in mid air. It turned and fell sharply into an impenetrable screen of pine trees, where he stood, watching.
Tear your clothes and follow,
for their faces are made-up in black, white and grey.
How sad, how sad - the dying flowers of fourteen days.
I watch him emerge from the scrubland, his head darting and bobbing, the shadow of a white heron that I barely recognise as him. He is wearing a black mourning coat; his chest is covered in black cotton that parts the heavy wool covering, his legs wrapped in charcoal canvas. He cannot see me here. I watch him for half an hour as he paces back and forward over the bridge, unsure, lifting his head and tilting it back to look into the distance. Before he leaves he kneels on the bridge, facing away from me, and bends forward or leans back, I cannot tell, black folding into black, a ritual with no point. I see a white ball fall from his hand into the river; it hits the water and expands, a sheet of blank paper moving through the chaos. A poem for the river.
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