She is a different She, mind you. This She strums hara-kiri. She pushes out pink flower petals from her eyes that bend her voice and make quartertones when they fall on her lap. Strums the biwa with a fan not the kind you know. This is a different fan. This is a different wind that blows between your lungs and heat and head She says
remove your hat young man, open up for once
how long have you held your breath?
(i am gasping, Wind tossed hair)
let's in the wind sings out it out stretching the syllables out into the oldcapital crests of shallow waves on the coast of Kamakura. It is a lunar singing. (In Sangubashi there is a sign over a door that says 'If only I could fly through the cosmos like a moon pilot.' I think She lives there.) She plays in between sun and moon and in the middle She keeps nothingness nine-folded resembling a cloud sewed up together with biwa strings She plays it like the female form, like my uncle's sketches he's got the form down, the tail and tuning knobs clipped up and jutting out on the sides in the hairstyle of Women in the Edo Period or in the style of human ribcages in any Period at all and the signature of the hands of a blind craftsman sitting etched under the instrument's bridge. This is where he lives and calls Home, under the bridge. It is the same bridge under which we swim. The same current of the koto. There are no answers you gotta go to the mouth for that. This here's only a tributary, we just ask our questions and ask the questions like we're reading a textbook and hope our questions are right kind. She's plucking the biwa only She knows what way we're runnin' but won't say. She just plays out melodies and her instrument speaks to me in the voice of that man that lives at its top. Stanley says She makes it talk. So i talk back.
oldCraftsman: And if instruments hold bridges then where is the water. Ask your Pen, your goodBook, go on then.
youngwhiteWritten: Wheres the watergone. Words no longer do the work of hands. Are wells are all driedup. Are the airWavingRivers too.
oldCraftsman: I made two new ones. Like a woman's body I formed them from a couple pieces of damp wood, let 'em dry in the sun for nearly ten years so its skin cracks and shrinks grappled in the fists of earth and sun and light and dirt all up in its nails. Your plectrum there...
youngwhiteWritten: This one?
oldCraftsman: ...that's the haircomb of a dead ancient Empress. Hold it. Take up your biwa. Learn to sit under the strings, strum it with your greatArm. And I will mine. Let's see the river for ourselves. If the water's gone from it I wonder can we still pray at its edge.
youngwhiteWritten: Can we bury these instruments down in the bed what do they grow into.
oldCraftsman: Ha. Go ahead. I ain't buryin' mine.
There's nothin' else to ask. She will eavesdrop but won't talk. Like the plectrum her hands and throat will warp if left out in the humid rainyseason air. So She keeps them to herself. She covers them good, propping her notes up on windows of Sangubashi shops, under the canopies, holdin' together with the glue of ricefields (maybe i need some of that for my heels). The war is sixtysix years over and She just now lays down her arms, lying down her self, pickin brittle grass and pluckin the blades in between a Son and crescentMother. She waves fast when She laughs.
Her whole Body. Resonates.
('Dammit. The river May be alldriedup.'
And sighs.
'Yea, Son, i think it is.')
