Japan, by Billy Collins
Today I pass the time reading
a favorite haiku,
saying the few words over and over.It feels like eating
the same small, perfect grape
again and again.I walk through the house reciting it
and leave its letters falling
through the air of every room.I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it.
I say it in front of a painting of the sea.
I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf.I listen to myself saying it,
then I say it without listening,
then I hear it without saying it.And when the dog looks up at me,
I kneel down on the floor
and whisper it into each of his long white ears.It’s the one about the one-ton
temple bell
with the moth sleeping on its surface,and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating
pressure of the moth
on the surface of the iron bell.When I say it at the window,
the bell is the world
and I am the moth resting there.When I say it into the mirror,
I am the heavy bell
and the moth is life with its papery wings.And later, when I say it to you in the dark,
you are the bell,
and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,and the moth has flown
from its line
and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed.(I first read this poem in 2005, in Japan for the first time, in a small Japanese class too hard for me held in a tiny lovely inn on the far northwest side of Kyoto with a beautiful front garden. It was the middle of the rainy season, and all my memories of Kyoto the first time are hung about with mist.
A more literal translation of the haiku {釣鐘にとまりてねむる胡蝶かな, tsurigane ni tomarite nemuru kochou ka na, by Yosa Buson} would be something like “Oh, the little moth stopped and sleeping on the hanging bell!” Let me emphasize that that is not a disparagement of translation linked to above, which is clearly the one Collins knows, and is beautiful, and not as different as you might think at first. A “hanging bell” is the huge, iron bell that hangs in a specific place in Buddhist temples; a “little moth” is a type of butterfly/moth with a famous dance built around it, and is the name of one of the chapters of the Tale of Genji. Getting all that in and keeping the poem beautiful is a feat indeed.)
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