Haiku
The boy is fifteen, cold and distant, he does not dream of a lake or rills or a boathouse or anything so pure as dark water, but something that might have been full of spring coldness, the sense of isolation in a chilling country of desolate people frightened of themselves, scared of the love of others, despairing of their mornings and dying into their evenings, a people entranced by the eerily green aurora borealis that flickered across their starry skies from time to time, that northern sense of place or placelessness, the freezing into hope abandoned, where history might rhyme with hope if it could, but where pastoral purity could not touch the ice-coldness of a boy who knew these people and their lies and dying cadences, and he wrote a sad poem for them because he knew he would have to leave, they were beyond hope and it would get much worse for them, as war does for people who cannot avoid it, so he wrote a boy's poem and left it on the tongue in that cold classroom, a kind of haiku at a time when he had never heard of haiku, and he had never dived into cold dark water with a girl whose eyes looked into his, though later some girls in an ancient Kyoto wood beside an imperial building, perhaps the Golden Pavilion, would try to tell him how you must compose a haiku, and he realised he could only do it if he learned the language of a poem that belonged in that language and that can only be uttered with precision by young girls who dived into cold mountain lakes and spoke in the rhythms of that country, because so many things about love, or about hate, cannot be translated, and the fathers of those girls knew so much more about hate than even he could imagine, and he wondered about their samurai swords and their folded precision, and the warm public baths they took, naked and not looking at each other,
