Japanese Gardens Revisited

by Nancy Wheaton

Everyone has someone who loves them.  A family member.
A best friend.  A lover. I knew I loved him

as I will love none other in my life, yet I didn’t love
him in a kissing, hand-holding, under the sheets on a hot

summer evening way.  He taught me how to see the sky,
to find Sagittarius.  How to laugh and climb, leap onto maple

branches.  Just to watch others walk underneath.  Try 
not to giggle.   Later, when readings became popular, he scoffed 

at astrolgers, except Ansara who tells us that our love is palpable.  Patrick
is my forever friend,  reliable like the stone pavement of the Ura Senke School

in Kyoto.  He gave me the book Japanese Gardens Revisited
for my birthday.  He thought of me on his base in Okinawa.

The stepping-stones of the Heian Shrine, in the river, cross to a rocky shore,
such as my life with men .  Sesshu is the greatest landscape artist in Japan,

though he began as an unruly child, like I became.  What could a mother 
do out of love but turn him over to the Zen temple for discipline

at ten?  At an age of wonder, of belief in leaps into trees, in flying.
In true love.   When Sesshu journeyed away from the temple,

so many showered him with poems that his boat looked like fresh fallen
snow.  My thoughts are snowflakes covering Patrick.  

He is so far away now. Marriages away.  A divorce away.
Climates away.  I insisted on naming my first child Patrick.

I was reckless in college, impulsive, charming, smart
and distant.  Patrick laughed, quoting Ezra Pound:

And the days are not full enough, and the nights are not full enough.
We fell asleep side by side after imagining the Moss Garden

at Heisen-ji.  I am quieter now.  Guarded.  I leave
gatherings early.  Read.  Inspect the seven varieties of foliage

in Sesshu’s scroll.  And life slips by like a field mouse, not shaking the grass,
continues Ezra Pound.  Nature, not man, is the dominant force in Zen Buddhism.

Leaves fall on the garden and the building at Shimane Prefecture, attributed 
to Sesshu.  This combination is said to form an invisible unit.