Cattle to be moved, my brother-in-law has just driven through the yard

(his Great Dane on the buggy riding shotgun) at the same moment I move 

you in this dim light (first, out of your red dress), then in redress of pain 

and harm perhaps from medications intended to save your life. 

Afterward on our porch with coffee, we find the fields across the way— 

suddenly cleared of cattle, a vacancy in the air, save the lonely mourning 

dove’s coo. How devoted she remains to that single tune in her repertoire, 

perfected and kenned by her ancestors long ago.

I’ve been finishing of late, Basho’s journey on Narrow Roads to the Deep 

North. An hour’s sleeplessness last night yielded high drama: difficult 

passages to distant Islands, near-impossible mountain-top ascents taken 

in much less populous and commodious surroundings.  He tells:

Bitten by fleas and lice

I slept in a bed 

A horse urinating all of the time

close to my pillow

Beautiful vistas and uncertainty measure any moment of his last sojourn 

through 17th Century Japan as at times he’s barely able to make the thrust 

to final anticipated reward. And how easily one forgets Sora, his companion, 

like the cameraman in a reality show—Always a poem to be written by one

or the other (or both) after each incident as if otherwise, nothing worthy 

happened at all. And to have lived thus so completely—three hundred years 

later—Seamus, in his ninth and penultimate Glanmore Sonnet asks: 

What is my apology for poetry?