The gods are crying in the next world. They yearn for the multiplicity of faces. They mourn for the hue of wet leaves and the smile water makes when touched by the wings of insects. They grow melancholy, these gods of the distance inside their caves of light, and when one is about to sink into madness under the eternal burden of silence, when he can no longer endure the center and yearns for the crack of wood or the bright smell of the morning, he travels the long distance to that fold in time which allows passage over, and there, strapping on the cloak of the bear, covering his impenetrable fire with the whiteness of bones and the blackness of fur, he pads the earth as if he were flesh. Now he cannot pull loose the disguise of flesh and blood. He must scratch the fur of earth in the toil of survival, moving like all creatures in the dance that carries him forward into the folly of years tumbling over years, until, standing on the shore of some water’s brilliance, the smell the winter wind carries arrives too late and the hunters are upon him, their knives flashing like the waters, and the bear-god, blind in his love and rage, strikes out too late and slips into the icy river, the high notes of the hunters coursing as they strike and strike, sending the god back wailing to the diffuse and empty sky, to the caves of light and his earthly yearning . . .
The Ainu are a Caucasoid race, more ancient than the Mongoloid Japanese, that are now confined to the northern islands of Hokkaido and Sakhalin.
This poem was originally published in Aileron (Aileron Press, Box 891, Austin, Texas, 78767) and is reprinted with kind permission.
— Ed.
