THE GAME OF 100 GHOSTS
Hyaku Monogatari Kwaidan-kai
poems
Terry Watada
©2014 Terry Watada
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in any form without prior permission of the publisher.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
for our publishing program. We also acknowledge support from the
Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of
Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
Cover photography and design by Peggy Stockdale
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
Watada, Terry, author
The game of 100 ghosts / Terry Watada.
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-927494-58-5 (ebook)
TSAR Publications
P. O. Box 6996, Station A
Toronto, Ontario M5W 1X7
Canada
www.tsarbooks.com
Contents
A Game of Ghosts
The Day After He Died
The Silent Mouths of Rain
impermanence
Prairie Luminescence
August Light
By a Chinese Lamp
Down a Country Road
A House of Crying Women
kiyooka airs
Come With Me
Last Dream
a last dream:
the last dream:
The Dinner
virgin moon
A Silent Rain
Suicide City
Lisa
Nighthawks
The Heart
those were the days of roses, of poetry & prose and
Closin’ Time at the 5 & Dime
The Game Nears Its End
Vanishing Point
Playing Pool
Babies in the River
A Period of Glowing Life and [Happy]-ness
while listening to Van Morrison
The Vanishing Point
A Visitation
Glossary
for my brother Hideki,
Mike Shin, as good a brother as I’ve ever known,
and my son “Bunji”, who loved both his uncles
A Game of Ghosts
night
crept like
smoke in a forest fire
at sundown
the evening
settled and everyone sat
in
a circle
around
a circle of candles.
in the brilliant
splintering demise of
the sun,
the timid wax’d flames
before the story-tellers
flickered
and sputtered
feasting
on air, awaiting
the smoke-filled capsule-
bodies of
ghosts.
tell the first story, tell
the second,
tell the one-
hundredth
extinguish each
candle with each story until
the remnant of the past
re- turns
and
a last conversation
(precious and true) takes place
between the mouths of the grieving and sorrowful
and
the thoughts of the
beloved dead secrets are
revealed.
The Day After He Died
the morning after . . . sun-
shafts
dappled the walls
with playful puddles
of light
felt his
presence the beauty
of brotherly love danced
on the walls through
window
panes
and i laughed as he might have
he was telling
me he was fine happy that
the pain, the thinning of
legs
and mind, was over.
don’t worry,
he said, don’t be sad just don’t be
and
then
i remembered mom okachan
coming to me,
bedside
the day after,
and
she smiled as she
gently tickled and
rubbed
my back
in a last gesture of motherhood
no worry no
cry i am all right
and all was well when the light faded
into the long evening & after-
moon shadows
The Silent Mouths of Rain
at
the striking of
blue
o’ clock
when a flock of clouds
muttoned to-
gether at the denouement of
evening, i
listened
to the mouths
of rain
rattling on
incomprehensibly
in a foreign tongue
mutterings of a
child-
hood
spent in a weeping storm
banshee barking
in
the night
ballet-weed newspapers
flying
flipping
crinkling snapping
ripping down alley-
ways
the sizzle of
the steady rainstorm
sub-
siding into a drizzle
and sputter of
whisperings of
long-ago dead
abuse:
ghosts speak
but
the mouths of rain remain silent
impermanence
the pain
of
dark places.
I.
4-room apartment with bath and kitchen
on
Powell Street, old Vancouver, 1937
Mondays, mom went
to sewing class
I stayed home
by myself
I was four
shadows grow into obake
before
his babyeyes
chinese breathing in
the back steam-laundry room pipes
hiss and wizz
with every press
for money he shivers in the humidheat
and
darkness
& he sits alone
in Kono’s front room only one light burns
quietly in a corner
The seed of all crime is evil; the Shadow knows . . .
a radio
a lone companion in his murky fright
Fukushima-san
crashes
into the apartment dropping
the evilseed bottle of whiskey
stumbles into the bathroom
I felt a duty
& obedience rise
to the surface
with-in me
I grabbed the bottle,
ran to the toilet
a room of ammonia stink and withered walls
and offered the bottle
to him
My eyes beamed innocence a smile
of helpfulness¸ innocence
He grew so angry, he growled
loudly like a ronin enraged
and slapped my face
I buckled and fell
back
to the floor,
the whiskey spilled and stung,
my red skin
and eyes
the light dims to unconsciousness:
The Shadow knows . . .
II. 1939
midnight
clatter
the imagegames the
mind plays
Okasan tiptoed in-
to
the kitchen
with me in tow the perfume of her
night
gown
in my nose some comfort
as obake rattle in the dark.
a flick of the light cock-
roaches feeding
on the butter dish
with exposure the onibugs
scat-
ter into dark places
holes & wallcracks
a boy squirms the
eyes tingle
Okasan brushed
off the remaining magician
insects down
the drain
and placed the butter dish in
the icebox
She
turned to me and said,
Mottanai, ne.
III. 1942
mom
lies on a gurney
in the hall outside the Vancouver
waiting room of purgatory
(dead
to the world
& so they hope)
the nuns
ink-bottles of
compassion with
only hate and indifference peering
out from their habits at the enemyalien
sweating with
pain,
death looms
praying for deliverance for themselves,
the sisters-of-mercy
yet he sits in the Kawai cabin in Minto
waiting
to
hear about otosan who had been
crushed in a truckroll down
a mountainside
he waits wrapped in
Kawai-san’s
fragrant ( of compassion)
dark arms of concern
I heard them
talking thru the walls
late at night conspiring to
give me away to the enemy
Japanese;
oka dead
otosan dead of his injuries
What else could they do?
a ten-year-old boy’s eyes
tremble
while submerging in water
as he did as a toddler,
as a child, as a teenager, as a
young
man
as a defeated man
and gazing at an alien
sun
IV. the 1960s
the absurdity of childhood memories
he
forgets them to survive
to live with himself though
the house of crying women
reminds him every
day every where every
which way
so he runs to
blank obscurity until
he
bites on his lip
holding in the pain and
resolving to gaman
in a moment of clarity, i hear my oniisan’s
words
of contempt, his choices . . . his failures
You have to know what you want to be so
you
can’t
sit on the fence forever
choose . . . choose
You’re in grade 10 for christ’s sake:
doctor, lawyer, architect, engineer
you need a 90 average
to get into
university
Drop music,
art,
literature,
take important subjects —
they can be hobbies to make friends
You don’t have to like what you’re doing
just do it and so he betrays his own
impulses, his own dreams
V. 1984
the hospital machines
begin
their countdown seconds
remaining to oblivion
for mom and he stands
in-
different to the im-
plications
It’s your choice
let her go I’m fine with it.
i can’t make that decision. not without you.
Say goodbye & be done with it.
his cold heart his negation of
intimacy brotherly love
the grief of
life &
death
comes over me
His boney hand at
my shoulder i am
a-
lone again
and i let mom go.
But in that moment,
he cries breaks down,
bends over
an old porcelain sink seeking
comfort
in the cold
and impersonal
i rub his shoulders saying,
“it’s all right . . . it’s all right . . .”
knowing it isn’t
I have a brother again:
compassionate, emotional,
in his shuddering love
if only for a time
VI. 2012
and in the days after he died
on a cool, crisp morning
i
hear him
in
my half-sleep
as clear as a
woman’s ocean eyes deep
water-black
& unfathomable
commanding me in his
stern voice
Just do it.
just do it,
so i will
in the constant shift of impermanence.
Prairie Luminescence
About twenty miles
south of Calgary,
back
in ‘46, she
walked along
a dirt road
toward the vanishing point
Her Eaton’s catalogue
dress with a flower print
flowed
around her
in a sad kind of way.
the grime of
her life
adorned her face