Kurahara Shinjirō: Two fox poems

A Vixen 

When snow falls
on the back of the wild fox,
she becomes a pale blue shadow.
At night in a blizzard
the shadow comes running down
straight from the mountain,
circling the fences in a frozen village,
moving around the orange dreams of the people.
The blue shadow, before they know it,
sits in front of a chicken coop.

Before dawn in February,
in the gleam of a damask mantle of snow
the vixen returns to the mountain.
She is pregnant.


A Footprint 

Long ago 
a fox ran along a clay river bank. 
After an interim 
of tens of thousands of years 
a footprint turned fossil remains. 
Looking at it, you’ll see 
what the fox was thinking while running. 

Tr. William I. Elliott & Katsumasa Nishihara. From Iwana (‘Char’) (1964, supplemented posthumously). Kurahara left Tokyo in 1945 to live the last twenty years of his life in solitude. The second of these two poems was dictated on his deathbed - what an extraordinary last legacy!

Sarah Kirsch: Cat Lives

Poets love cats of course
The gentle free who cannot be controlled
Who sleep and dream November rain away
On silk chairs or in rags speak back
Without saying a word shake themselves
And get on with their lives
Behind the hunter’s fence
While his possessed neighbours
Are still noting down number plates
The one being observed in his four walls
Has long left the borders behind.

 

Tr. Anne Stokes. From Cat Lives (Katzenleben) (1984). Kirsch (1935-2013) spent much of her life in East Germany but in 1977 emigrated to the West. She was a serious cat-lover. Her Cold War life explains the reference to the “possessed neighbours”; the cat of course is the poet.

Claudia Emerson: Rabbit

1
Same as you, Claude says, creature of habit,
travelling the same narrow path worn
slick, through broomsedge and scrub pines.

To hear him tell it, the hotel in town
still stands, wants to buy every rabbit
you have for a quarter a piece, the meat

lean and dark, cleaned and ready to be
cut up for the frying pan. So you fashion

a trap—you’ll need ten of them for fifty
acres from whatever scraps of wood
and wire you can scrounge from around

the place—and nail it long and narrow, set it
to face the path. Same as you—for an apple
core—same as you, he’ll come around.

2
You go around with a lantern every
morning before light; right away you
know you’ve got one by the little door

being shut. You reach in and grab it quick
by the hind legs; that’s where the strength is.
You know the way you would a newborn

to smack it alive? Hold it tight and upside down.
Sometimes one dies from the fear, saving you

the trouble, but in any case, all it
ever takes is this—quickest clip with the edge
of your hand, see, right here behind the neck.

You can skin it easy with your fingers;
it’s slick—he leans over, slips the sock off
your foot—as this. 

Emerson died in 2014; this is from a posthumously published collection, Claude in Time and Space. Claude was her father. Here she may be forcing herself to be unsentimental about her father and about the rabbit, so as to be unsentimental about her own life: she was dying of cancer when she wrote the poem.

John E. Smelcer: Beaver Story

I want to tell you a strange but true story.

You may think beavers eat only trees and wood, but

I’ve seen them eat meat.
I’ve seen them eat salmon.

I was fishing for salmon on Clearwater Creek.

Just then, I heard a loud noise.
I walked along toward the noise.

A beaver was eating the heads of dead, spawned salmon.

Only their heads!

I don’t know what it means.


Tr. John E. Smelcer. From Beautiful Words: Kasuundze’ Kenaege’ (2011), a collection of poems originally written in Smelcer’s first language, Ahtna, an Athabaskan language of southern Alaska with only about 20 speakers left (of whom Smelcer is by far the youngest: he points out that one day he will be the last surviving speaker).