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SHEPHERDING
Today I paused to considerhow odd it must be for thoseborn, bred and always livingin a city, say New York, andto sill be a lover of poetry.So many poets, from Keatsto Hirshfield will take youinto nature, bathe you in wordsbeneath a star lit sky, sit youin a meadow, breathing airthat has never known the exhaustof…
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AKASAKA
It sits off an alleythat winds off an alleyhalfway up the hillyou climb from Akasakato Ropponggi, cursing the layoutof the subway at the endof a too long day of meetings.There are no plastic samplesin a glass case outside the doorjust a t-shirt and beer mug, forribs and fires don’t translate wellto polystyrene and the loudoldies…
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OH MY GOD
On the subway there was a placardtelling me and all of the other riderswhere we could find God, promisingsalvation if we made the search. Someone had scrawled beneath it“God is ded.” I was left to wonderif the writer also thought that Godwas now somehow deceased, and how you would knowif that were really the case,…
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SENSO-JI
By hour six, the plane was just a lumbering beast dividing the sky, halfway from God knows where to nowhere special. His body cried for sleep but he knew he had to deny it. That much he had learned from prior trips. For when he landed, made his way painfully slowly into the city, it…
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TOKYO MEMORIES
1. An older, silver-haired woman in neon green pants, a brown blouse and black shop apron stoops and carefully scrubs the alleyway outside her small shop. 2. Salarymen fill the tunnels of Kokkai-gijidomae station at 6 P.M., 7, 8, and in fewer numbers, 9, shuffling down the long corridors to the Chiyoda or Marunouchi Line trains,…