The Maynard
Spring 2016

“Yohaku No Bi” or “Beauty of Remaining White Space”

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for Yukihisa

Alone

between withering autumn
and muddy spring

in the company of my own
barrenness now

and again, I return to the fallow
my brother left

white for me,

first to its heart,
where a few, diminutive

earthworms in Kanji
wiggle to his chuckling—such

handwriting a sign of a lesser
character, they say in Japan—on the final

page of the yellowing letter to Canada
he wrote twenty-four years ago,

then further east to our

clover-strewn fallow,
flooded for the rice to grow, where

       a boy flies

through mud, water,
up and down after a frog,

       and his leaping heart—

as if he had known what I would
as if he had known what I would and must.