Aaron Caycedo-Kimura wastes no time revealing what Ubasute, the title of his exquisitely produced and conceived chapbook from Slapering Hol Press means. His first poem “The Moon of Ubasute,” a reference to the 1891 Tsukioka Yoshitoshi woodblock print, opens in the voice of “his mother” telling the son that he must “carry/me up the slope/of Tanigawa” and abandon her there to die. She is old, blind and crippled. While Tanigawa is known as the mountain of death, the poet paints a landscape more in keeping with the Elysian Fields of Greek mythology. The mother says to leave her in a cradle of hakone grass, a cascading mound of slender leaves that certainly would cushion as well as please. She continues:
…Without pity,
my son, the moon
will watch as I reach
for my mother—
Okaasan, Okaasan.
The ginkos will bow,
weep their leaves,
bury me in gold.
If the mother (and she is Okaasan too) does not ask her son to treat her with reverence, she certainly expects nature to honor, not pity, her state of being. She envisions her end buried in the golden leaves falling from the ginko trees.
With this mythological introduction, Caycedo-Kimura moves into the deaths of his parents and then back in time when they were alive. Both had hard lives. His father had been incarcerated during WWII in a Japanese internment camp by an order of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his mother had suffered through the firebombing of Tokyo.
Among the Dresser’s favorite poems of Ubasute is “Memorial.” The subject matter is so surprising that she had to reread the poem to understand that the poet’s father had been an accomplished gymnast, something the son never knew.
Straight as steel, hands on hips,
Dad balances like a hood ornament
on Irving Wasserman’s head.
The email from Wasserman to the poet requests a reunion with the father who had already been dead seven years.
… He calls my father
remarkable—a word I never heard
used to describe him. But yes, look.
There he is. Poised in the air,
the husband who never cheated,
the father who never struck me.
Just as the die-cut cover reveals a fragment of Yoshitoshi woodblock print underneath, Caycedo-Kimura reveals just enough for the reader to understand the weight of a son’s love for his parents. The pacing of each line is a testimony to his tender regard which is never sentimental. This is a book you will want to hold in your hands and carefully turn each page.
