Gary Snyder
Soy Sauce
Standing on a stepladder
up under hot ceiling
tacking on wire net for plaster,
a day's work helping Bruce and Holly on their house,
I catch a sour salt smell and come back
down the ladder.
"Deer lick it nights" she says,
and shows me the frame of the window she's planing,
clear redwood, but dark, with a smell.
"Scored a broken-up, two-thousand-gallon redwood
soy sauce tank from a company went out of business
down near San Jose."
Out in the yard the staves are stacked:
I lean over, sniff them, ah! it's like Shinshu miso,
the darker saltier miso paste of the Nagano
uplands, central main island, Japan–
it's like Shinshu pickles!
I see in mind my friend Shimizu Yasushi and me,
one October years ago, trudging through days of snow
crossing the Japan Alps and descending
the last night, to a farmhouse,
taking a late hot bath in the dark–and eating
a bowl of chill miso radish pickles,
nothing ever so good!
Back here, hot summer sunshine in dusty yard,
hammer in hand.
But I know how it tastes
to lick those window frames
in the dark,
the deer.
Gary Snyder, No Nature: New and Selected Poems, Pantheon
Books, 1992.