ALAN BOTSFORD SAITOH
Alan Botsford Saitoh was born in Connecticut and educated at Wesleyan University. His latest book of poems, "A Book of Shadows," appeared in 2003, while "mamaist: learning a new language," was published in 2002. He was a 2001 Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry and holds a M.F.A.in poetry from Columbia Univeristy. He lives in Kamakura, Japan with his wife and son and teaches at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama.
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A MAMAIST LOVE SONG
America the beautiful over there--
Let me call you sweetheart.
This is the prisoner's song (yes, we have no
Bananas) whispering, 'I wanna
Be loved by you, me and my shadow.'
Can the circle be unbroken? Night
And day pennies from heaven?
--Brother can you spare a dime??
God bless America, you're the top.
This sentimental journey near you
Body and soul. Kind of blue
In the still of the night, I only have
Eyes for you. You send me (who's
Sorry now?). What I'd say??yakety-yak?
The old black magic (got my mojo workin)
The music man?whole lot of shakin' going on.
Que sera, sera? Chances are, I fall to pieces,
But for what it's worth we shall overcome.
Turn, turn, turn, sing, sing, sing?
The times they are a-changin'
(I heard it through the grapevine).
People get ready! Dancing in the street!
Everybody loves somebody! My girl, my guy?
Close to you. (Let's stay together. That's
The way I like it.) This masquerade stayin' alive.
(No charge.)
Free bird, behind closed doors I can see clearly now!
(If you don't know me by now?we are family.)
When will I be loved? You free fallin, the wind
Beneath my wings?Graceland. Fire and rain burning
Down the house. I'm so excited. (You can't touch this.)
One sweet day my heart?achy breaky heart?will go on,
Wide open spaces? Candle in the wind, please remember me.
Something to talk about. For you're still the one, America.
I will always love you. Thanks for the memory. I hope you dance.
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SEASON FOR REFLECTION
Gather round me against the forgetting,
Cornucopia, this song and dance pursuit.
For I would be up to speed with the rest of love,
Waterbourne in the heart of winter.
Singing back the world where I was,
A praise song after us?partial
Explanation the bruise of this?
Otherwise no return, otherwise
No happy marriage of grammar
And a hunger, no small comfort
Of what I would do, beyond recall,
In a fast break to the outer world
(goodbye to the old life), the green one
over there, if I could just get there,
doing without the invention of heaven,
the perfect heart God says yes to,
the one playing in the dark
where the dead smell and envy
the cord that would not (listen) break.
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A MAMAIST CONCEIT
I'm so real I'm reeling
In my other self forever--
Like the fish that got away,
Still multiplying like loaves.
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A MAMAIST CONVERSATION
We take our talk too often small.
Forgetting how a conversation, brief or passing, can call
Our whole lives to account, like a sudden squall
Or a purging storm that may shift
The wind for a day. Or a lifetime?
Talking to you, Beloved,
I wonder who I am this time.
A white ibis flew over my shoulder as I slept.
And I could hear the fluttering of its wings,
I could see the whiteness of its feathers,
Or was it an angel
On the waves of the trees
Eddies branching upwards,
Past turtle doves frolicking, dancing
Across the billowing green?
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A MAMAIST GUIDE
You have lost your way
There is no place to go
Money that you thought you needed
There is none
The address of where you were staying
It is forgotten
The shoes that have brought you here
They are gone
You, you think, you are waiting to suffer more
There is no other way
You will explore
The live-long day
And I, I will be the one
To help tell your story.
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A MAMAIST PRE-POSITION
I am passing through, not over, all that's been passed down and on
To get to the real news I've spent years not reading.
I am charging ahead past the negative and positive
Charges of words (who's in charge, anyway?) in order to bring charges
against what is there
I am gaining en route on all that I've lost, for
In the going I've found Nature undertaking her journey, too.
I am sounding in the silences imposed upon my time
Sentences with or without me in them, that engrave the places I'll
Be in the future tense I feel all over, with senses to spare!
I am rolling in the hay or dough I would leave a trail in,
If I could, my body testament to the frolic fraught with
Such suchness as to be a treasure no island can ever hide.
I am giving to (not in, or up, or over) what we would charitably forward to
The next, and the next after that and on into infinity
Moment, like a letter with no return address from the depths of hell.
I am (when it's necessary) the stranger Love never fails to surprise,
Dancing my dance with arms reaching out and across
The starlit divide.
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A MAMAIST WALKER
I don't know
how to hold
the I anymore,
I come and
go, the wind
that billows the
sails of my
self blows through
me like a
breeze through branches
of a tree.
When I touch
the ground, the
ground touches me.
And I mean.
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A MAMAIST SLEEPING BEAUTY
I have been sleeping who would wake me?
Sleeping's beauty pulled me under I saw
The irresistible the transforming the utterly
Creative flow taking me to my mind's flaw
In the flaw I saw, utterly, me without me?
And now I'm back, barely recognizable
To myself will you show me, kiss my lips,
Will you slake me, make me yours?
I am sleepy, my head is round and full
Of sleepy thoughts sweeping me to foreign shores
Where at the fountain of your presence my mouth sips.
O who will slake me, make me yours?
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A MAMAIST ICARUS
Jerking off at the moon all his life,
He thought he could become the sun,
prodigal one that is.
But it's what we have to say to one another,
he realized, that night puts words to
minus the reasons why.
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A MAMAIST DYLAN THOMAS
Luck like a heatstroke carried him far
Into the fires of his being where
Zig-zag lightning struck at the heart's
Swift gift of boundless time, and he rose
Phoenix-like into the joy-scattered sky,
Feverish in the father gleam of his eye.
He, darling of the family, rang evil in, too,
And to oblivion walked-with, not towards, stayed true,
And now he lives, belatedly, past all created myth
Deep in the belly of the swollen earth.