When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai 

in the gray rain, 

in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty, 

he fell straight as a pine, he fell 

as Ajax fell in Homer 

in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge 

the woodsman returned for two days 

to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing 

and on the third day he brought his uncle.



They stacked logs in the resinous air, 

hacking the small limbs off,

tying those bundles separately. 

The slabs near the root

were quartered and still they were awkwardly large; 

the logs from midtree they halved:

ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood, 

moons and quarter moons and half moons 

ridged by the saw's tooth.



The woodsman and the old man his uncle 

are standing in midforest

on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.

They have stopped working 

because they are tired and because 

I have imagined no pack animal 

or primitive wagon. They are too canny 

to call in neighbors and come home 

with a few logs after three days' work. 

They are waiting for me to do something 

or for the overseer of the Great Lord 

to come and arrest them.



How patient they are!

The old man smokes a pipe and spits. 

The young man is thinking he would be rich 

if he were already rich and had a mule. 

Ten days of hauling

and on the seventh day they'll probably 

be caught, go home empty-handed 

or worse. I don't know 

whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean

and there's nothing I can do.

The path from here to that village 

is not translated. A hero, dying, 

gives off stillness to the air. 

A man and a woman walk from the movies 

to the house in the silence of separate fidelities. 

There are limits to imagination.