BASHÕ II Poem by Cees Nooteboom

We know the cheap perils of poetic poetry
And of moonstruck singing. It is embalmed air,
Unless you make stones of it that glitter and give pain.
You, old master, cut the stones
With which you can kill a thrush.
You carved from the world an image that bears your name.
Seventeen stones like arrows a school of silenced singers.
See by the water a trace of the poet
On his way to the inmost snow country. See how the water erases it
How the man with the hat reinscribes it
Saving water and footstep, always arresting lost motion,
So that what vanished remains as something that vanished.