God’s joy, wrote Rumi,
moves from unmarked box to unmarked box. I remember my sister’s husband,
 after her stroke, complaining
“Liz is a box. It says
 on the outside Liz, but she’s not there, not the Liz I married.” “Is she simple,” our daughter wondered, noting how the sheer
weight of loss
 had rendered my sister speechless. But […]

By Sam Hamill

Narrow Road to the InteriorBy Matsuo Basho. Translated by Sam Hamill. Shambhala Publications: Boston, 1991.105 pp. $10.00 (paperback). As Sam Hamill reminds us in the preface to this lucid and engaging translation, Basho’s haibun—brief prose combined with haiku—is a “return to natural, spiritual, and literary origins.” Hamill’s translation, a gift of careful attention, does not separate poetry […]