Another year gone --
hat in my hand,
sandals on my feet.
Basho
Goodbyes are poignant. They belong to the part of life that's hard to write about. It's time for me to move on to other work, but it's with mixed feelings that I am passing along the Poet's Choice column to the capable hands of another. This column has meant a great deal to me over the past three years, and I'd like to leave it with a special nod to the reader, whom I think of as a friend. I'd like to sign it with a wave and even a kiss goodbye, the lyric as farewell. As Wallace Stevens writes, "That would be waving and that would be crying,/ Crying and shouting and meaning farewell" ("Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu").
My grandfather taught me that, when a friend or relative was leaving on the train, we should stand on the platform and continue waving until the train had disappeared. It was something he learned from a Japanese friend. I was delighted to find this notion confirmed in Robert Aitken's illuminating book, A Zen Wave, in which he remarks that the Japanese say goodbye to the very end. "They wave and wave until their friends are out of sight." He points this out as part of a commentary on one of Basho's poems, which Robert Hass renders:
Seeing people off,
being seen off --
autumn in Kiso.
Basho seems to be saying that for him fall in Kiso is the time of departures. It is almost the outcome -- the upshot -- of our leave-takings. Now we say goodbye to our friends, now our friends say goodbye to us.
The experience of seeing off a friend is also important in Chinese poetry. Here is Ezra Pound's version of a striking poem that the wanderer Li Po wrote in 754 about parting from a dear one in Hsuancheng. Pound's lyrical adaptation first appeared as one of "Four Poems of Departure" in Cathay (1915). (There is also a strong version of this poem in Red Pine's Poems of the Masters.)
Taking Leave of a Friend
Blue mountains to the north of the walls,
White river winding about them;
Here we must make separation
