M I R A G E
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Japanese Cottage Walls Bob La Fleur Today there’s no need to imagine I’m snowed in, alone against a wind pounding walls, as if they were walls of paper, with a readiness to tear. Desolation of winter storm is part of me now (a secret sinister part of me, unlike mother love and duty) a part of me knowing I am inseparable from the wind. There were times, better times for lightness of being, when the poet Basho traveled with what he could carry, with trust in the wind, to be taken where the wind blows. My bones chatter, like the rice paper of Japanese cottage walls, chatter and go where the wind (with no wish to confine me) weighs the pounding, the tensile strength of this garment of being.
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