Andrew Lansdown: ‘Adoration’s Adorning’, ‘Bats’ and ‘Shaving’

Adoration’s Adorning
Hozen Temple, Osaka

1
Set in a writhing
flame mandorla, the figure
of fire-god Fudo
is mantled with shaggy moss
sodden with water folk toss.

2
Lovely, the living
greenery devotees douse
with their libations:
Tempting to forget how cross
Fudo looks beneath the moss.

3
The moss apparel
reveals a strange reversal
of god and people:
tossing water with a ladle
they give life to the idol.

Andrew Lansdown

Karesansui

Who would have picked him
for an admirer and practitioner

of Zen’s austere aesthetics,
that farmer who is turning

his pre-winter wheatbelt paddock
into a dry landscape garden?

See how he is dragging a gigantic rake
behind his blue tractor

patterning the soil with parallel furrows—
row upon row dipping and rising in tandem

according to the sweeping
hollows and hillocks of the land.

And look with what lovely lines
he has encircled the granite outcrops …

Those great stones now standing
in relentlessly lapping waves—

are they the juttings of Oyashima,
the Country of Eight Islands,

or the rearings of Yamata no Orochi,
the Dragon with Eight Heads?

Imagine them how you will, still
they are most noble, most splendid,

those big naturally-placed boulders
artfully graced with roundabout ripples

in the paddock’s boundless sea.
And take in the very vastness of it,

that hundred-hectare plot of raked sand
studded with metres-high stones—

karesansui on a scale inconceivable
to the ancient Japanese masters.

Note, too, how skilfully the Zen farmer
has employed the distant mountain range

as a backdrop, borrowing its beauty
to enlarge the borders and enrich

the associations of his own creation—
the raggedy-edged Stirling Range

setting the range and extending the reach
of this stark sand-and-stone garden,

and suggesting, if somewhat
hazily and bluely, the longed-for

small mountains semi-circling Kyoto.

Andrew Lansdown

Bats

There are mites moving in the fur
of the pygmy bat whose radar
went awry and sent it slamming

into the windscreen of my car
as it hurtled down the darkness
of the wandoo-lined country road.

I unlatch its membrane wing snagged
in the windscreen wiper, a wing
black as the wiper’s blade is black,

and touch with one finger the fur,
the downy-soft mousey-grey fur
still warm on the cooling body.

And I think of the vampire bats,
the blood-lapping bats of Peru,
whose skins the Quechua stitched into

a cloak for the Sapa Inca,
their son-of-the-sun-god sovereign,
whom the Spanish conquistadors

captured but let keep his women
and his clothes, including a strange
stately cloak that claimed 80 bats

whose patchworked pelts, the astonished
Spaniards said, were “softer than silk”,
a cloak that could not protect him

from their gold-greed or their garrot.

Andrew Lansdown

Shaving

And shaving my father
in the hospital bed

I recall how he shaved
a son who was not dead

even though he had fired
a bullet through his head.

Andrew Lansdown