Always Abundant
The brushwork is calm and luminous … in his seventies, [the
artist] Ueshiba used the name Tsunemori, “Always Abundant.”
— John Stevens, The Art of Budo: The Calligraphy and Paintings
of the Martial Arts Masters
I too would like a new name, something
that’s not George. I’d like a way of bathing
in sunlit waves off the coast of Casablanca
or Tangier. A way to inhabit a Moroccan tajine
without getting burned or seasoned with the lamb.
Yes, I’ve been rereading the poems of Aleixandre,
of Blas de Otero, both of whose graves I visited
after Marrakech in Madrid. Yes, I laid their books
upon their stones, and now I hold them against my chest
when the winds whip down from the Rockies. I want
a name like that. Like Wind, say, or even Whips Down.
Something a word like George could dissolve
into. Once, in the other life, I had no name,
and only the insides of the insides
of things glowed. Now I feel cobblestones
of Marrakech rush up again through my feet,
moiling my toes, and I’m back among the scorching
stones. Last month, the cab driver called me Brother.
And that’s a name I want back. Baba, too,
was good — anything untainted with shame.
Paul Bowles tells us at the close of The Sheltering Sky:
Because we don’t know when we will die,
we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well,
yet everything happens only a certain number
of times, and a very small number, really.
How many more times will I pet a dog?
Stroke the delicate wings of a dragonfly?
Even say George without a scowl?
The great Japanese calligrapher Tsunemori
signed his name in cricket blood and spider milk —
without killing a single living thing. And no one
knows how or why or what if. He puzzled people
by only writing his name in rain. I’d like a new name
like that, like the one Tsunemori took, signing
himself over to the world historically
as Always Abundant, or inscribed in the other world
as Here, Brother My Sister, Hear Me Dissolve
My Mouth Among Shrinking Threads of Rain.