Contrasts in places and ideas isn't a bad thing, I think.  I came across the picture Margaret snapped of me in Lisbon a few years ago, so I decided to use it today.  On the other hand, I may have snapped the lens of the camera resting on a tripod (I see in the picture that I am holding a remote device.)  However it was, the graffiti on the ancient wall is definitely not Tokyo, where I was seventeen years ago when I wrote the poem.

Tokyo, Thursday, August 10, 1990

ASAHI ORDER

The way the occasional renegade pine tree rises above the others,

Audacious, conspicuous, defying the impulse for order

Reassures and worries me all at once,

Knowing as I do that growing apart from the common crowd

Can make an angel or a monster of a man.  

It doesn’t happen often in a grove of timber bamboo

With graceful tops like bowed heads all hanging the same,

Respecting the physics of wind and rain and natural order

As if commanded by some ancient supernatural shogun.

The Japanese are more bamboo than pine, I think.