Comice

I think of Issa often these days, his poems about the loneliness

of fleas, watermelons becoming frogs to escape from thieves.

Moon in solstice, snowfall under the earth, I dream of a pure life.

Issa said of his child, She smooths the wrinkles from my heart.

Yes, it’s a dewdrop world. Inside the pear there’s a paradise

we will never know, our only hint the sweetness of its taste.

From “The Poet’s Child,” edited by Michael Wiegers

(Copper Canyon Press: 144 pp., $12 paper)