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Sport 39: 2011
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Chouko explained that though my hokku had sabi (loneliness) it lacked shiori.
‘Tenderness?’
‘Forgive, I show you.’ She wrote down this poem beside my own.
Asleep on one another’s shoulders
young people
clutch their shopping.
This season’s jeans are the most distressed.
It is not quite autumn.
The first blush.
Written by Chouko Kobayashi.
Together we improvised a sequence of linked hokku.
page 136These I transcribed at furious pace in felt-tip pen on a table napkin, gouging the paper in my haste to keep up as the images flowed back and forth between us.
Finally excitement and thirst overcame me: I hurried to the bar for a pitcher of beer.
On my return to the table, alas, water had worked its elemental synaesthesia. Our words had opened out into pictures, an aqueous blue calligraphy. Fish surmised in a blue current. The poem you imagine you have written in a dream.
Of Chouko herself there was no sign.
The rumour of iris blossoms.
A dry pool.