A shaggy crank

 I should have given some samples of Baisaō’s poetry. Here are the first and third parts of “Three Verses on a Tea-Selling Life”:

 

I’m not a Buddhist or Taoist 

not a Confucianist either

I’m a brownfaced whitehaired

hard-up old man.

people think I just prowl

the streets peddling tea,

I’ve got the whole universe

in this tea caddy of mine.

 

Seventy years of Zen

got me nowhere at all

shed my black robe

became a shaggy crank.

now I have no business

with sacred or profane

just simmer tea for folks

and hold starvation back.

 

Gary Snyder loved the line about the shaggy crank.

I love lines scattered through The Old Tea Seller’s poems about the ordinary business of life. He fed his brazier with pinecones. “Pine wind” was the combination of smoke and steam that rose from his fire, the smell competing with the aroma of the tea.

During his years in Kyoto, The Old Tea Seller rented several tiny places. Here’s his note on moving:

 

Having learned the ways of silence

within the noise of urban life

I take life as it comes to me

and everywhere I am is true.

 

• Source: Normal Waddell, The Old Tea Seller: Baisaō; Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. The inscription is on pp. 53 and 36.