Snowfall at Aojima Shrine, New Year’s Day
by Bern Mulvey
Each year just after midnight on January 1, millions of Japanese nationwide leave their
homes for hatsumōde, the first shrine or temple visit of the year.
Same yet infinite other
the sky becomes you,
underfoot ice, eggshell,
the sea about us froth
and break, spray tossed high—
how water always finds
the quickest path. We arrive
to a throng waiting,
breath that spider’s web
rises from each mouth,
the red gate, 鳥居 Door of Wings
and like that something fast
frightful enters—god about—
all of us slumbery, red-eyed,
walking 800-year-old steps,
on both sides ocean
wind-spun caps quicksilver God about
the New Year’s bell
again and again rung,
the dwindling
echo of it.
A stone cistern
named 唄月 Song-Moon
lines in front—everyone washes
hands, faces, water filled
with ice, ablution, though
it never cleans, loss,
longing, seeds of wish sown
in a hard garden. To live
is the rarest thing,
the storm deepens
archways white to the sky
channels to the sea.
Bern Mulvey lived in Japan for seventeen years. His first book, The Fat Sheep Everyone Wants, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize, and his second book, Deep Snow Country, won the FIELD Poetry Prize. He lives now in Arizona and teaches writing at Eastern Arizona College.
