Walking the dog,
                        you meet
                        lots of dogs.
                                     —Sōshi

One was a seventeenth-century doctor
arrested for trading with Dutch merchants.
One loved sake then disappeared
through the doors of a monastery in his final years.

Another was a freight agent
who became a nun after her husband died.
Quite a few lived the samurai life
excelling in the lance, sword, and horseback riding

as well as poetry, painting, and calligraphy.
This one started writing poems at eight,
and that one was a rice merchant of some repute.
One was a farmer, another ran a pharmacy.

But next to the name of my favorite, Sōshi,
there is no information at all,
not even a guess at his years and a question mark,
which left me looking vacantly at the wall

after I had read his perfect little poem.
Whether you poke your nose into Plato
or get serious with St. John of the Cross,
you will not find a more unassailable truth

than walking the dog, you meet lots of dogs
or a sweeter one, I would add.
If I were a teacher with a student
who deserved punishment, I would make him write

Walking the dog, you meet lots of dogs
on the blackboard a hundred thousand times
or until the boy discovered
that this was no punishment at all, but a treat.

And if I were that student
holding a broken piece of chalk,
ready to begin filling the panels of the board,
I would first stand by one of the tall windows

to watch the other students remaining in the yard
shouting each other’s names,
the large autumn trees sheltering their play,
everything so obvious now, thanks to the genius of Sōshi.