After the Party - Drinking with Basho

sharing hot sake

the master and I swap lies

no more truth than this

Outside autumn stars dance, and the milky way arcs north to Colorado.  Chill settles into the sage, and the last rumble of departing tires on gravel melts into the background of night without even a coyote bark to disturb a brief private meditation.  But tonight shirtsleeves are not enough; I shiver, come back to the moment, and retreat into Rancho Relaxo. 

After the party is gone, food put up, dishes done and the sink drained, a grudging calm stills the house.  No clink of glasses or dull hum of conversation, no rolling laughter or poetic expostulation.  From the kitchen no wafting reamins of posole on the stovetop, just the slightly acrid background note of wick and wax from the recently extinguished candles on the ofrenda.  Then, subdued but undeniable, the sound of something liquid, and a fleeting nuance of warm sake. 

Against the fainter black of night outside the open shade, between the hanging paper lanterns, below the now dark party lights, I dimly discerned the outline of a slim figure alighted on the table, where Basho's shrine was supposed to be; maybe it was a trick of dark, but I swore it was the honoree.  As my eyes adjusted, my mind's eye imagined the thin trace of a smile, as Basho proferred to me a cup and a cast chinese pot normally reserved for tea.

Sake? he asked, Of course, I said.  He poured and gestured towards a chair, as I took the cup and sat.

I always enjoyed a good party he began, and so regret it when they end.  So I thought I'd make myself comfortable, and savor the night while I finish a bottle.  I hope you don't mind that I borrowed your teapot, but I wanted hot sake and it's all I could find.  No sense to leave the sake sit while night is left to drink it.

So we let the stars drift, engrossed in talk, and quietly laughed at dog snores from the other room, and critiqued the night's events.  Of all he heard, and he heard it all, he was most surprised to hear haiku, and found the form strange in a foreign language.  I liked it though, he finally said.  After three hundred years the form might as easily been dead.

He talked of Nippon and ages gone, and of places like Ueno, Kyoto, and Edo.  I admire your mountain, it reminds me of home, and of stars hung with cloud, on cold nights like this one.  But there there was water, always an incessant motion moving towards something new.  Having lived near the ocean, I felt a familiar susurration, but I told him wind in the sage was now my constant reminder, and fragrant as well when the wind blew up a gale, or in the morning after rain, or an afternoon hail.

And he spoke of young love, and his companion Yoshitada, and how he wept when Yoshitada died, and knew that only poetry could ever take his place.  And of my lovely bride, sleeping amid perfumed sheets in an adjoining room, he questioned the mathematics of more love and fewer poems.  No regrets, said I.  In the long dark my lines would have been thin comfort.  I knew I could not write the sound of one hand clapping.

And so we sat and drank and drank and sat, and solved no problems that I know, settled in like starlight letting the silence grow.  At length he said to me, The bottle is empty, and the sky tilts towards dawn.  Time to put away the night and follow the long path into a different day.  I stretched and yawned, and his apparition faded away.

So off to bed, to greet my wife warm sheets.

But I'll keep a bottle always against the time, when a poet comes again to share his night with mine.