Perspective, Part Twelve: Distance

Today, I've had two poems circling around each other.  I've been doing my best not to pin them down.  I have no desire to concoct an "explanation" for why they have appeared beside one another.  However, at one point a single word floated up:  distance.  And then I told myself to stop thinking.


          Tinker's Wife

I saw her amid the dunghill debris
Looking for things
Such as an old pair of shoes or gaiters.
She was a young woman,
A tinker's wife.
Her face had streaks of care
Like wires across it,
But she was supple
As a young goat
On a windy hill.

She searched on the dunghill debris,
Tripping gingerly
Over tin canisters
And sharp-broken
Dinner plates.

Patrick Kavanagh, Ploughman and Other Poems (1936).


     The grasses of the garden,
They fall,
     And lie as they fall.

Ryokan (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 4: Autumn-Winter (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 366.

I have no idea what distance has to do with any of this.  And I don't want to seem coy or pretentious by bringing it up.  I'm not harboring any secrets. I'm merely reporting what happened.