The Poem (Mainstream Fiction)

 

On the streets of Japan, in a town in the mountains, they are lost, and she panics. They walk down a street that looks like every other one. A thin road climbing toward the mountain peak, hung with banners bearing Japanese characters, packed with tiny shops and people.

Lost. Totally lost. He admits as much to her and he says it gleefully, making her want to hit him. Tingles of panic sneak into her limbs, and her legs and arms are watery. She tries to keep her feelings hidden and it makes her tense and irritated. Keep calm, she tells herself. It will be OK, you’ll turn a corner and realise you were just a street away from somewhere you recognise.

The next corner reveals another road she has never seen. She tugs Simon down the crowded and unfamiliar street. They move to step around a group of bums that sit on the pavement of the sidewalk. Simon bumps one of them and the man—not Japanese, maybe Canadian—laughs. Simon chuckles with him and the people who are walking by look at him oddly.

Simon takes her arm and moves the two of them forward into the circle, joining the mismatched group who play guitars, African drums and pipes in a nook on the sidewalk of the street as the people go past, treading around or stepping over them. They are of different backgrounds: she sees two Asian boys (she guesses one at eleven and the other sixteen); an ancient, parchment-skinned oriental man; a teenage girl who looks Indonesian and is barefoot with grubby feet; and the Canadian who holds a guitar (who even laughs with a husky Canadian accent) and sits on his rucksack on the ground. She doesn’t want to sit down. She’s worried because the sky is darkening to purple and the air is turning cold.

But Simon pulls her to sit cross-legged on the pavement like the others. He asks their names in English. She has noticed that most Japanese can speak a little English.

The old man, with the skin like yellowed, treasure-map parchment introduces himself. His name sounds like “Yuichi” to her, or something similar.

She misses the names of the two boys and the girl. The Canadian stretches out his hand.

“Hey. I’m Trent.”

“Claudia,” she responds.

“Where are you guys headed?”

“We’re lost.”

The Canadian grins. “You’re in Japan. That’s where you are. Now you’re not lost.” His light brown beard frames his jaw, leaving his upper lip bare.

She looks over at Simon. The Indonesian girl is handing him one of the drums. Her hands are small and coffee coloured, and her skin is drawn smoothly over them and looks very soft. They are tiny on the sides of the drum as she lifts it, although it is not that big. Pigskin has been stretched across it to form the top of the drum.

Simon takes it and sets it between his knees. He looks questioningly at the girl, and she smiles and nods. The eldest of the two Asian boys begins a beat on his own drum. It is fast and merry and it makes her think of medieval music without the fiddles.

Simon tries to copy the beat on his own drum: Chucka, chucka, chucka, THUD, chucka, chucka, THUD THUD. He’s doing well, only dropping out of rhythm now and again, picking it up fast. She watches as his hands slowly move into time with the older of the two Asian boys. It looks like fitting the last piece of a puzzle, as their hands move simultaneously and the music seems to lock together and she can’t tell one drum’s beat from the other.

The Canadian flicks his guitar pick from where it rests between the strings at the top of the fretboard. He puts it down for a minute, while he adjusts his seat—his rucksack. She looks at it: a white, curved triangle with red lettering scrawled across it. The letters say, Born to Muse. How cool, she thinks. The younger of the two Asian boys, the one she guesses is eleven or so, takes the pick from the ground. He feels it between his fingers and looks at the letters.

The boy hands Trent the pick, and the Canadian winks at him and takes it with deft and slender fingers. He starts to strum and the guitar sounds warm and crisp from its steel strings.

People continue to walk by, but there are fewer of them now, and the music is beginning to get into her blood: she doesn’t feel so awkward sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. She taps her foot on the pavement and smiles at Simon. She has forgotten she is cold.

She feels a hand on her shoulder and, turning, she sees the old man. He holds his pipes out and gestures for her to take them, his lined, wind-beaten cheeks creasing in a grin that in a movie could look sinister—especially with the dark gaps from his missing teeth—but instead looks friendly and wise to her because he has the pipes in his hands and wants her to be part of the music.

She doesn’t like to refuse, and a portion of her is eager to try adding her own sound to the others’, but she doesn’t know how to play an instrument and doesn’t want to feel stupid.

The old man—Yuichni? Yuichi?—takes her hand in his leathery one and gently places the pipes in it.

She lifts them to her lips. She looks at the old man.

“You blow gently. You hear which one sound right,” he says. His English is good, much better than her Japanese.

“Thank you.”

She waits for a moment to join the music. Her first note is a hesitant, tentative one, and sounds like what it is—nervous and weak. She takes a breath and tries again. This time she blows harder and the note comes out strong. It jars with the music so she tries another; and this one melds with the drums and guitar.

Growing in confidence, she takes a deeper breath and blows again, drawing the note out longer. She moves to other notes, higher and lower, and finds her niche in the music, the beat where her pipes fit and complement the whole. She’s surprised at how easy it is; many of her notes are off but she identifies the ones that work, that fit, that sound right like the old man had said. It’s playing with it, just playing with it, she thinks. It’s not hard unless you’re afraid of making mistakes.

They are sitting here, on the sidewalk of a street in Japan, making music with a group of people she doesn’t know. She has never done anything like it in her life before. This is cool, this is so cool, she thinks. Then she remembers she is lost.

Trent strums his last chord and it tapers off while Simon and the elder boy look at each other and then finish their drum beat in time: chucka, chucka, THUD THUD!

She’s thinking that these people aren’t bums; they’re just people who aren’t rushing anywhere. She’s not sure who they are now.

There is a moment of easy silence after the music dies, with only the footsteps of the few people still in the street; there are no cars or trucks bumping up the small road. The evening really is quite lovely. It’s the night she’s afraid of. The daylight has faded enough that lights are beginning to flick on in the run-down buildings in the street. The yellow light is stark and bright against the dark creeping into doorways and behind houses.

Simon looks at her, smiling. “Read them your poem, love, they’ll want to hear it. Poetry is good after music, because it is music, softer music. Will you read it to us?”

She looks around at the faces of the people she’s just met and doesn’t want to read her poem because she doesn’t know them—not well. It’s getting dark and it’s late and she and Simon are lost. The music and the smiles have made her warm, though. She thinks of the lines of her poem; the one she felt and then wrote while she and Simon drank tea in a Japanese restaurant earlier that day. She’s proud of it, and thinking of it, she wants to share it. The urge comes suddenly with the thoughts of her writing, and fills her so it’s bursting inside her and wants to come spilling out. It will make a connection between them, like the music did, and because she likes them she wants to connect. She hesitates. Then she thinks of the old man pressing his pipes into her hands and decides that she should perform her poem—because she wants to.

She has it in memory but, just in case, pulls a piece of dog-eared paper from her pocket. The words are written on it in her hand, shaky and slanted from having leant against her knee as she wrote.

She starts to speak. She’s not sure if they’ll understand her but they are listening intently and quietly. Slowly she stops worrying as she falls into the rhythm of her poem.

Her voice rises and falls with the words, and she starts to feel stronger and more certain of herself because she likes the sound of it—the way her voice is soft and feminine and seems to reflect the stream-of-thought with which she writes her poems. Sometimes when she reads her work, her voice sounds too thin, too stumbling, and it irritates her because the poem isn’t coming out the way she wants it to. She isn’t an actor; she’s a writer—but poetry, she knows, is given to being spoken, performed. Tonight, it comes out like she wants, and her voice sounds like she wants it to.

She finishes her poem, and the old man exhales deeply and slowly. His face is quiet and still, as though her voice has lulled him into relaxation. The two boys do not exhale; they take in a breath, as if awakening. The Indonesian girl watches her with large, thoughtful brown eyes, her elbow sitting on the drum and her chin resting on her palm. Simon’s eyes are closed.

The old man bows his head to her. “Thank you,” he says, as though she has given him something.

“It’s getting dark,” the Indonesian girl says to the old man. “Can I stay with you tonight?”

The old man replies with a short word in Japanese and the girl appears to understand, because she beams and jumps up.

The old man looks at the Canadian. “Come to my home, there is fire there, and my wife, and more music.”

“I’d love to, man, but I want to be in Tokyo by tomorrow evening. I think I’ll hop a bus out of the mountains before they stop running for tonight.” He winks and snaps open his guitar case. “It’s been good guys.”

Yuichi nods and turns to Simon and her. “Will you come to my home?” He smiles. “And we shall read poem and I shall show you haiku.”

She tries to catch Simon’s eye and shake her head slightly. She takes his arm. The old man understands and moves away to give them privacy to speak.

“We’re lost,” she says to Simon.

“Do you care?”

“Of course!”

“Why?”

“Because it’s cold.”

Simon grins. “But we have each other to keep us warm.” He loops his arm over her shoulder and cradles her neck.

“What happens if we freeze?” she demands.

“We can’t freeze. We’re invulnerable.”

She knows that’s not true. “We can.”

“We won’t.”

“We might.”

Simon laughs softly, deep in his throat. “You’re too beautiful, you can’t die.”

She buries her head in the folds of his clothes.

“You’re beautiful.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You are.”

She sucks in a breath. “Aren’t you worried? Anything could happen to us.”

“I feel invulnerable.”

“I don’t.”

“You did when you read your poem.”

“No … ”

Simon is watching the Asian boys farewell the Canadian. “This is the poem of our lives. We don’t want it to be like every other.”

“No.”

The departing backpacker hands the youngest boy his guitar pick, telling him to keep it. It is the one with the scrawly red lettering—Born to Muse—and seeing the Canadian hand it to the boy, who looks up at him with a slow, shy smile, makes sudden tears well and cup in her eyelids. She feels a little silly. She tries to surreptitiously wipe them away.

Simon turns to her. “Let’s go with these people, they’ll take us somewhere warm. Let’s find out who they are.”

She knows that she likes these people, but she doesn’t know where they are going, or where she and Simon will spend the night. Heading off with them is heading into the unknown. We’re invulnerable. No. No we’re not. I know that. I wish we were.

Simon waits quietly for her to decide.

She thinks that maybe feeling invulnerable is feeling good and trusting … that maybe feeling lost is feeling afraid. She doesn’t know if that’s true. Just as she doesn’t know what this night will bring if they go with the old man and the others. But she didn’t know how they would receive her poem, and she didn’t know if she could play the pipes, yet she did both and they made her feel good.

She decides, and twines her fingers in Simon’s; and with her small hand in his big, warm one, she lets him lead her into the night after the others, their breath misty in the air as they walk, and the cold hard like glass against her cheek. The stars are tiny, shining secrets in the sky, and they float in the liquid blackness as though in the sea at night, when the water is inky and covers you like thin syrup that is icy and fresh. She’s not cold. She’s not fearful.

She’s listening for the next line of her poem.

First published in FreeXpresSion magazine (2007)