An evocative journey, including vignettes of Kyoto’s four seasons in keeping with Japanese literary and artistic traditions. Nature and human life are skillfully woven together through these images.
– Karen Lee Tawarayama

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Interlude: Kyoto
by Brenda Yates

Windows flung open, wide night brings itself indoors. But this air’s never
enough for me: no melancholy wannabe lotus-eater long  

endures those bitter onslaughts chilling down to my smallest bones, bones which
even now, despite spring, remember and hunger after sun-baked warmth.

*
Rainy season days, cloudbursts, thundering restless nights until wind turns
and dawn, breaking bright, fructifies promises, ones that rise in the dark
like colorless dreams while feverish green ideas sleep furiously. 

*
Overhanging heat, unruly July, ever-more lush August, brings
energy-sapping days, and nights too hot to sleep. Our languished spirits—  
complaints voiced—bed down for fitful slumber on not quite cool balconies.

*
Then another fall’s fiercely vivid death: autumn leaves on stoic ground
and chilly air just right for a wandering walk’s long meditation.  

Or to watch robed monks chase American children out of the temple
after finding they’d climbed behind Buddha to see what he looked like there. 

*
Opening the door, I leave home. Winter’s crisp breath excites my bare face.
You can laugh because you know what’s coming but hope’s inexhaustible  

(although this year might be almost identical): piled up, grotty snow
rutted, ice-glazed roads, frozen eyelashes, burning lungs, cheeks, ears and nose;  

fingertips, toes too cold to move, part of winter’s aged harvest of bones
when no happiness need apply, only waiting to fling this aside.