Free The Plum Rains and Other Stories by Givens John Page B

like that.
    I see, said the session scribe. ‘Fingerlings.’ And there would be a few of them, I suppose. So it moves the tone of the poem from solitude to convergence. A nice change.
    Ohasu shot him a quick glance of gratitude then lowered her eyes. But he was no ally; she didn’t have one here.
    The silk merchant picked up his fan. Kichiji was a large, well-fed man who had accumulated an immense fortune over the years, and who detected within his talent for shrewd business manoeuvres an overall excellence of perception. It’s as I’ve always said, said the silk merchant. The energising faculty of the engaged imagination generates its own transcendent experience . One has been awake all night no doubt, sitting beside a mountain stream and musing on the sadness of the beauty of the nature of things, hearing the changeless change of deep water moving deeply, as if welling up from within the mountain’s dark depths…
    Kichiji paused, overcome momentarily by the profundity of this explanation. He had paid for the Old Master’s cottage, and he had also bought all its furnishings for him. Kichiji liked providing things for those who could appreciate his munificence, and he lifted his elegant fan in celebration of the subtlety of his thought and the generosity of his spirit then let it drop to his knee languidly, much in the way Old Master Bashō himself sometimes did.
    The session scribe seemed about to speak so Kichiji pushed forward. And then, he said with certainty, one becomes aware of the far bank of the stream as it emerges from the shadows and brings itself into one’s consciousness, gradually, gradually, like abutterfly fluttering out of an icy mist as it comes so exquisitely forward…
    His voice trailed away again. He smiled to himself and lowered his eyes, too moved by his own eloquence to continue.
    After a moment Ohasu asked, But how is a stream bank like a butterfly?
    It is a metaphor, replied the silk merchant.
    Yes. But which for which?
    Which for which?
    Yes. Is the stream bank a metaphor for a butterfly? Or is the butterfly a metaphor for a stream bank?
    Kichiji held himself upright, assembling the full magnitude of his dignity before lifting his fan again. The image comes into view as if released from the grip of the mountain’s silence. And the trees and the rocks and the water grasses are still only patches of darkness even as the surface of the water begins to become visible, gradually, gradually, and then within that icy water, one becomes aware of the ineffable there -ness of fish. The silk merchant nodded in pleased agreement with himself. And so then thus, as it were, if I may say it, of the melancholy beauty of the burden of being.
    I think it’s simpler than that, said the session scribe; and someone else said, So do I.
    Old Master Bashō waited, his bald head tilted off to one side like an ancient and imperturbable tortoise. ‘In the icy clarity of the mountain water, fingerlings,’ he recited then said: A very good link.
    Indeed it is, said Kichiji, always quick to agree with his teacher.
    If, for example, the provisional female-member had chosen ‘hatchlings’ instead of ‘fingerlings,’ then the link would have been a failure.
    The silk merchant returned Old Master Bashō’s gaze then looked away. Yes, he said. No doubt that’s the case.
    No doubt, said the Old Master. The question is why.
    Yes. Why. That is indeed a question…
    The circle of linking poets sat pondering the distinction between hatchlings and fingerlings or pretending to ponder it, their breaths pluming out whitely in the frigid air like some bizarre form of signalling device.
    The Old Master would not force a new link. Nor would he do everything himself, for the method of his art was in the binding together of a group to fashion a poem that no one of them could have managed alone. If you don’t understand why that image is the right choice, he said, then how can you create a stanza that connects to it?
    The