The flood arrived down Kisogawa river when he was seven, he said, and washed away his mother,
this flood that is always coming
Later in life, they say, he burned a wooden buddha, put it on the river, bouncing miles to the village below, which said,
Look! I am high in the mountains! Starving!
‘Time is Heaven’s River – wear the robe.’ He hacked 100,000 buddhas from this wood and put them where they belonged,
like smiles!
no, like orchids in moonlight
*
and always came back to the rough old mountains.
(That story about him living on pine needles though his body, tarred from the inside, for preservation, (you can see them set in display, at Mirokuji) – I can’t believe it, surely? loving women the way he did
but,
who knows?
everything’s likely.
His robe was only silver grass,
his candle an old chisel)
*
I hear the river chanting day and night in this fourth week of what will be another dry and empty summer.
We were worried enough by the floods in February: the villages, people drifting around on the news in boats.
It’s said the seasons have slipped their cogs.
But back in the Tokugawa shogunate you had to put up with your place! So Enku slept in the mountains and practised the way of the artist.
See, he said, I am (nearly) free with time
*
And wrote:
For my mother’s life I wear this kesa, patchworked like the fields and muddy orange as if it were taken straight from a body
Feel the suffering worlds he wrote, in this, and you can live!
