Air Raid

in a paulownia box a silver Noh mask

my grandmother in ashes a purple cord

a string of prayers paper cranes

red and white and me

lonely without Hina dolls

Zuihitsu on Immortality 

On the radio a man says aging is a problem to be solved. Soon we will be alive three hundred years—all in a matter of time. 

The other night my love turned his body to mine. This life, he said, is my heaven.

Unable to die one’s own death, man’s inescapable fear is not that of dying but rather that he cannot die, Nishitani Osamu wrote. 

A pot of water boils on the stove. On the radio a news report on the virus updating its code as it moves through millions of bodies. 

We never fully disappear, only change. Will we recognize each other as dirt and tree, as pieces of DNA intermingling in a great-grandchild? 

Replication, Nishitani wrote, is death. In our bodies we are always living and dying. 

I turn off the radio. Bibimbap for lunch: hakusai, kimpira gobo and fried tofu on a bed of steaming rice, with sesame sauce. We eat and what was dead rejoins the living.