Jigoro Kano on his 78th Birthday

As if the state of Japan depended on smothering me 
beneath the same earth they said my mother was turning in
              since that year I turned nine—
as if the plummeting gray clouds, the rain dripping
past honey-licked blossoms 
              weren’t enough to tighten my breaths,
                            my classmates began to heave me to the ground

where the cherry trees grew.
Gunji, the fattest one, always jabbed a quick shin-bruising kick.
Each time I felt my back freeze
against the dirt or stiffen into a trunk’s dull, barb-like folds.  
My gasps punched the walls of my lungs like a hammer.

I wanted to learn to throw a man: 
Father’s composed shoulders above me, 
the way I sunk into his approaching silhouette 
that seemed to say everything in a single no.
And, later, how I disobeyed him.

As a child I didn’t understand 
why the long-grass whistled to nothing in the wind.
I didn’t understand why the spring shed its finest petals, white silk 
              twisting out from red centers. 
So much giving, so much release.

When we die, I like to think we will fall down
and blow free from the shuddered limb’s greens—
tiny satellites spinning backward,
holding on to nobody and rising.