[Image: Lantern slide (undated) in the digital collection of Oregon State University. This hand-tinted photograph depicts the Japanese god of wind, Fujin; the photo’s subject is a statue of the god, found in the Iyemitsu Temple, Nikko, Japan. (Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) That thing slung across his shoulders is not a giant sausage but a bag of wind. For another photograph, see this page of illustrations in a travel guide by one Joseph Ignatius Constantine Clarke (!), published in 1918.]
From whiskey river:
Utopia
Island where all becomes clear.
Solid ground beneath your feet.
The only roads are those that offer access.
Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.
The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.
Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.On the right a cave where Meaning lies.
On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.Into unfathomable life.
(Wislawa Szymborska [source])
…and:
Epithalamion
The elm weaves the field’s late light, this hill
hanging from the tree’s roots like the moon
From its shadow and the whole
world beneath suspended.Roots knead the earth’s thick sorrow.
Still, leaves from this.
From this unshackling, birdsong.I am a blade of corn where you kneel,
wind and quaking stalk.
The elm’s body a vase of poured sky.The tree will die.
Someday, the tree will die.For now, this axis—
what we choose to compass by.
(Hannah Fries [source])
…and:
And I would be the wind, whispering through the tangled woods, running airy fingers over the island’s face, tingling in the chill of concealed places, sighing secrets in the dawn. And I would be the light, flinging over the island, covering it with flash and shadow, shining on rocks and pools, softening to a touch in the glow of dusk. If I were the rain and wind and light, I would encircle the island like the sky surrounding earth, flood through it like a heart driven pulse, shine from inside it like a star in flames, burn away to blackness in the closed eyes of its night.
(Richard Nelson [source (not canonical)])
