Tiny so green frog 

sunning on garden latch -

 I'll get lettuce later

THE AMPHIBIAN STABLES

The little green frog who owns the top of our garden faucet post hangs around there all day (and night, I suppose), since it affords scenic views, is nicely situated in the dappled shade of the chestnut tree and is rent-free, plus its promontory situation gives sir frog a good view of any approaching lunch, so he has it pretty good, as lives go.

At first, he also occupied the top of the blue hose itself, which, being attached to the faucet, when not in use is draped over the faucet body behind the handle, but when Froggo used that area he would find himself on any given morning being grabbed suddenly by a giant hand and complications would ensue, so he stopped hanging out on the hose, moving now and then only as far as the cool faucet part; but then some mornings, out of nowhere this big blue coiled snake would descend toward him regardless of the fact that he was even then awaiting breakfast, and instead had to leap for dear life about a mile down to the ground, then it would take him frog hours to get up to his aerie again.

So over time and through mutually shared experience, the good green sir and I have reached a tacit agreement. I can now come close with either hand or hose and he feels no need to leap for his life, because I make no sudden moves. For his part, among other things he does not even use the hose as his privy. We've got our agreement now, we work well together, it's a nice little morning-and-evening arrangement we have. He can chill, I can chill etc. Now he stays on top of the post, a large area for one so small. You could probably fit 20 of him there. He uses it as his home, office and dining area, but, not being especially discerning in such matters he also uses it as his privy, though it turns out he can only do so for about a week, when even with careful placement he finds that that he has been crapped out of house and home.

Thus it was that one morning, after a couple weeks of no rain, I came out to get the hose for watering and noticed that there was no frog atop the post, which had all the character of a derelict frog latrine. Frogs have little skill regarding such niceties (they have no guests, nor do they care what other frogs think of them, their toilet arrangements etc.), and despite his careful spacing, it had been only a matter of time before the little green fellow had been forced off the premises. Long-term personal planning is just not that big a part of frog life.

So when I turned on the hose, I took the opportunity afforded by the absence of his greenness to blast the top of the post clean, in a small-scale version of that earlier stable-cleansing Hercules had been tasked with, only there was no immortality kickback involved; I just did it for the frog. When evening came around I went to get the hose again and there was Froggo, perched in his old place, regally surveying his fresh domain, the height of amphibian comfort. Though frogs have no facial gestures that we know of, when I bent close to look I could swear I saw a smirk of green gratitude playing about those lips.

CLOSE-UP

I was out early this imminently rainy morning checking the firewood tarps and at one point during the process, as I rose to my full height beside a cord of oak I found myself close-up eye-to-eye with a frog the size of a chick pea, who'd been chilling out atop the tarp enjoying the gray dampness that was his day, on his rampart. I wasn't surprised to see a frog up that early, even though his crew had been up all night singing about the wonderful rain and this perfectly watery environment with prayers for more and suchlike, the common material of frog lyrics. He, however, drew back a millimeter or so in shock at the sudden appearance of this huge head before him, but at once he regained his composure and stood stock still in that haughty froggy way, so we just stood there staring at each other.

I don't know how often frogs get to see huge heads up close like this, but I thought him remarkably brave to stay in place; thus we got to see each other very close up. He got so see how I need a shave and should clean my glasses, maybe do something about those eyebrows and get a new hat for godsake, whereas I got to see how perfectly green his body was-- the perfect green, to my eye. I can think of no match for it really, a bit too light for imperial jade... I can't say I've actually seen this kind of matte green anywhere before, maybe in Aztec wall paintings, but it was deeply appreciable to me. The upper parts of his minutely greened limbs were dusted in gold powder, like you see on some old Japanese creations of urushi worth millions of dollars, but his was an older kind of masterwork he'd had done for free. His splayed and bulbous hands and feet were translucent, a nearly transparent cloudy green of beyond museum quality. He also had some neat black curlicue pinstriping here and there, most notably on his face and around his eyes, two tiny orbs of dark, deep onyx that just looked at me with that look the world gets on its face sometimes when you really stare at it.

We stood there gazing at each other in natural silence until I just had to say something, me being the bargee, so I said Wow you are a work of art, that design is amazing and those colors are just... His eyes seemed to say Maybe. I don't know. I've never really seen myself. Anyway, I didn't do any of it, so what can I be proud of? Don't praise me, or the next thing you know I'll be taking credit for it; you two-leggeds know where that can lead. Anyway, I wasn't always like this, I had a tough childhood. For a long time I wasn't even a frog. No legs, even had a tail, constantly morphing, it was all pretty traumatic,... Anyhow, none of it was my fault or doing, so I can't really feel guilty about it or take pride in it, can I. You look proud, I said, the way you stand there. No, that's just the way you two-leggeds look when you think you have something to be proud of. Which isn't too much lately, is it... Saying which, he hopped casually away.

Jaw dropped, gazing after him, my huge head was shocked at his wisdom and all that he knew about us.

BATHOS

About 11 o'clock this morning as I was clearing the old onion bed and prepping it for what I haven't yet decided (the possibilities in gardening are as many as those in youth, which can be at once nostalgic and unsettling, an interesting combo), some of those youth of Japan who are mute in the sociospiritual sense and depend upon incoherent loudness for public expression - hundreds of them in this instance - came motorcycling past on the road down by the Lake, flicking their accelerators to flatulate the fact of their presence.

This usually occurs at night in the city, to the delight of those heavily put-upon urbanites trying to sleep on the other side of thin walls a few feet away, but on nice sunny Sundays like this the mutes sometimes roar collectively out into the country, where they can eructate in the light of day.

As they did so en masse, moving on by in their superficial soundcloud, a startled frog in a nearby kinmokusei tree suddenly began chirping rapidly with irritation. I couldn't make out all that he was saying amidst that torrent of noise, but before he was drowned out he said something like: What the hell is that? Who are those amateurs? How come they're saying nothing so loudly?

Amazingly, he was voicing the very same thoughts that were even then burbling up from what must be the amphibian levels of my bathoconscious!

How unlike an exhaust pipe!

FROGLEGS

I was working upstairs yesterday morning when Echo called me from the deck to come look. Sounded interesting.

When I got down to the deck door, by way of intro she told me that she had been just about to get her leg warmers off the laundry pole when she found that one of them was being used.

A savvy neighborhood frog had had the same idea regarding use of the garment during the chill of the night and early morning, and had co-opted use of the leg warmer by backing neatly into it under the big old clothespin. Snug as a frog, and no hovering hawk would ever spot him there. He was safe and the froglegs were toasty. He had a happy warm face on him, too-- bit of a pleasant frogchuckle hovered there somewhere.

He was so contented, in fact, that he wouldn't move no matter how paparazzi my camera got. He knew a good thing when he'd found one. Echo has to use another pair until Froggo has finished using this one, which may be a while; the green dude's pretty stylish looking in that leg warmer. This may get to be a frogleg fad...

FROM A GOOPY FUTURE

You know how it is when you're freewheeling down an amber mountain early on a blue spring morning, you zone into the big picture and just pixel along... So it was with me when I went down to the station this a.m., and so it was as I went through the ritual of leaving my motorcycle, bending down in the same zone to put my helmet strap as usual into the helmet lock-- when there staring back at me from another world was a jade-shade frog, as comfy in his place atop the lock as I would be if I were still in bed. Seems I get a froggy stowaway every year at about this time.

Fortunately I had a bit of time to spare for some amphibian conversation, and it was a fine morning, so I asked if he was gonna move or what. He looked at me goggle-eyed as if I was another species, kidding him bigtime. He was hunkered on his magic shelf that flew like the wind, and he wasn't about to give it up. Would you? It had borne him in a windy twinkling from a hoppy, floppy lifestyle, with a goopy future, to a fresh beginning in a newer, harder and impressively technological world. Trains sped past above us; cars whizzed by out on the road, there was asphalt, and no mud! And here he was atop it all! These matters filled his dark eyes as he gazed at me with the somber expression that attends all amphibian revelations.

His magic shelf fitted him perfectly, as though he were glued to it at every key point, and not only physically; he looked almost melted in place. Not wanting to interfere with this radically new perspective to which he clung so tightly (or perhaps I was misreading it all, and he was awaiting a ride back home to his family of millions?), I tried to fit the strap into the lock by edging it in under his rear, but His Jadeness clearly did not intend to return upmountain: at the touch of the strap, with a froggy "Geronimo!" he leaped over my shoulder and onto the asphalt of the bike parking lot, astonished at this new hardness and dryness as he hopped about, taking in the variety of new perspectives.

He had made his start. And who knows but one day, when the world's predominant life form has long been amphibian, he will be the Adam of his kind.

I will be the absent footnote.

ABSOLUTELY FREE

This morning when I went out into the golden air to put some compost atop the potato mounds to see if I could protect the plants against the first frost due any day now (I put some early compost into the potato hole at planting, too), thinking the warmth might keep the temp up just enough, on my way there (I finally did get there and do that), as usual I couldn’t pass up all the chestnuts lying on the dewy ground, shining in the sun in that gemlike way they have, calling to those childhood yearnings in me to invent all the things there are to do with beautiful chestnuts absolutely free, you cannot just leave them lying there) I had to pick them up, even though we already have far more than we can use this year-- I figured T-san, the lady who lives right in the heart of downtown Kyoto and comes out a couple of times a week to tend her piece of land just above us, might want them; she usually stops by on her way home and gathers wild herbs on our land, and chestnuts at about the right time of year, but came early this year and found none, only the brown empty early reject husks.

Haven’t seen her since, so I figured I’d save these for her before the bugs got to them, filled my cargo pockets and wound up walking around with bulging thighs while splitting wood and listening to a solitary but loquacious frog in the bamboo who heard something deep and moving in the bass impact of maul upon iron wedge into thick-barked oak and simply had to respond, so the frog and my labors had a sort of conversation, a rhythmically perky exchange that gave an uplift to the proceedings, frogs have much to say, and need someone to say it to, so I was happy to fill that need, happy to listen to such natural eloquence coming from a cloud of green leaves…

Now and then all through the day the occasional wafts of kinmokusei fragrance would come drifting along on the air and lift me from whatever level I was at the moment, the kinmokusei trees not sending out their heartstealing scent constantly, they’re smarter than that, somehow know that our weak noses would soon get used to the fragrance and stop smelling it, so they send it out in waves every just-right now and then, to stop us in our tracks and make us reel with appreciation, remind us of that big thing we’ve forgotten about again, which is even more effective at the end of the day when your mind is empty as a desert sky and you’re carrying firewood to the stack in the dusk as the birds are giving their evening concert with insect lyrics, your body carrying you along without complaint, your back, upper arms, forearms and hands pretty much used up after hours of gripping, swinging and lifting…

I was in the work-meditative groove and didn’t want to stop, the moments were perfect, like the air and light-- so I just walked back and forth between the split pile and the new stack carrying one split in each hand, stacking them and then going back for more at a slow pace like a mill horse, rambling around in a circle, allowing my absence off in that mindcloud somewhere, when T-san showed up at dusk and I gave her all those chestnuts; she gathered some more that had fallen since, then on the way back to her car held up the bag for her little dog in the back seat to see, said kuri, kuri! the dog barking in delight, she said the dog loves kurigohan (chestnut [cooked with] rice ).

Then I wrapped it up: stacked the last, put away the tools, watered the garden and let tiredness rule its hard-won kingdom.

THE FROGPHONE ONLY RINGS ONCE

The other day I was out splitting wood and I heard the phone ring. I put down the axe, took off my gloves and ran into the house because I was expecting a call from Echo, who was on her way home from visiting her folks in Nagano, and I’d have to pick her up at the station. Got to the phone and it had stopped ringing. Or had it rung at all? Went back to work.

At some point on the next day the same thing happened: the phone rang just once, I standing there with the phone in hand, wondering if in fact the phone had rung at all. Was I hearing things? My ears didn’t seem to be ringing, but all those decades of loud music, even that full-volume Zappa this morning...

That afternoon I was out on the deck, with a higher aural vantage, and I heard the phone ring again. Only it wasn’t in the house: the sound was coming from the paddy across the road! Just one ring. It was a frog calling. Without a phone. So one frog had learned to emit a tradition-breaking ribbet that was precisely like the sound of our telephone ringing. But only once.

You can stand there for an hour, if you’re like me this afternoon, and not hear our phone ring in the paddy even once; but get into a distracting task or a distracted state of mind, and suddenly the phone rings (is the frog watching?); you respond to the sound with what we humans call a Pavlovian reaction, but in this case I guess would have to be called Frogovian.

The only onceness of it is what makes it effective in tweaking any human with a phone like mine. If he went riiiing riiiing riiing etc. as frogs have historically done with their ribbetry, I would pinpoint the sound and not be fooled. The wily singularity of the ring, coupled with its sonic precision, leads me to an ominous surmise: that there may be purpose here, or at least a natural encroachment of some new kind upon we humans, naively isolate in our technococoonery.

It seems to be just one frog at the moment, since there’s no cacophony of ringing phones and no callbacks that I can perceive, but how long can that last, if the frog is having such fun? If my intensifying surmise is true, this could get worse, and more diverse. Soon there may be more events of this nature-- frogs sounding like doorbells, alarm clocks, chatmail... Already there’s that bird - in the Amazon I think - that imitates the call of the chainsaw… Nature, being everywhere by--well, by nature-- is always listening and always learning, and now it may be conspiring, in this mild instance to run us pointlessly to our phones. But if one morning in the future you rush out of the house and jump into your car only to discover that it’s a tree-- and it's taking you somewhere you’ve never been-- remember you heard it here first.

And no, I haven’t taken hallucinogenics in years.

INTREPID GREEN

This morning after I had motorcycled down to the station I was putting the lock on the rear wheel when I noticed a frog on the rear carrier, where he stood staunchly facing the rear, bulgy eyes blinking rapidly and looking as though he had just swallowed a lifetime.

No wonder-- he’d come all the way down the mountain with me. He’d been up there living his hoppy morning life, enjoying the peaceful blue of a clear dawn from a splendid chrome promontory in froggy solitude, when everything at once began roaring and bouncing around-- then the whole world took off, and he hadn’t even lifted a leg.

Turning toward the rear so as to streamline the wind, it was the first time he’d ever traveled backward, the first time he’d ever stood in place and seen his entire environment moving away from him, the whole mountain (there are mountains!) slip away behind him (there is a past!) into the sky as we descended. The radical effects of these phenomenal changes on the corpus of frog thought are simply unfathomable.

What we can say, with a good deal of certainty, is that the green pioneer was the first of his generation to travel at 40 mph, the first to get to the bottom of the mountain, the first to travel a highway, survey a parking lot, and countless other achievements as yet unrecorded in amphibian archives. No wonder he was standing so staunchly, blinking so hard. Frogically speaking, it must’ve been like getting a Nobel, a Pulitzer and an Oscar all at once.

Now that he’s all puffed up at having joined the ranks of the intrepid, he probably won’t be there this evening, but if he is, I’ll double his achievements by giving him a ride back to whence he first set out, where he can spend the rest of his life as a green Marco Polo. No one will believe him, either.

STOP ACTING LIKE A HOOD ORNAMENT

Came out of the house in a rush this morning 'cause I was a bit late in my usual train-catching schedule, reached to put the key in the motorcycle and beheld, there where you'd put a hood ornament - if you were of such a mind and a motorcycle had a hood – there, facing forward with all the green hauteur you've ever seen, a proud bright-emerald frog, bulgy black eyes gazing ahead like the elegantly stylized hood ornament on a Rolls Royce Green Ghost, as though he were thinking: now this is speed, this is quality, this is where I belong-- but of course it wasn't a Rolls, as I've indicated, it was merely the humble motorcycle I use to freewheel down the mountain to the train in the morning and power back up at night, but frogs can get carried away.

Even though he was way too classy for the vehicle, I wanted to leave him there, posing like a green Mussolini with his proud amphibian heritage, but I couldn't see him holding office very long when I really got rolling; and waiting for that embodiment of pride to fly off like a spinning frog and get splatted flat on the road would not only be a shame in terms of froggy nobility and all that, it would distract me from the total focus that is essential for freewheeling fast down a one-lane, sharply and blindly curvy - and wet - mountain road with now and then delivery trucks and automotive residents speeding up it on hurries of their own.

So although I wouldn't have minded having a live emerald hood ornament, I had to get the supreme leader off there, and I was in a hurry as I say, so I poked him in the rear with the key. He jumped much as Mussolini would have jumped in response to such impropriety, but the crafty little green guy landed on the hub of the front wheel inside the spokes, begetting even more grotesque freewheeling images that posed even greater loss of face and whatnot for Il Duce.

So as the clock ticked I had to get down on my knees and poke around in there, trying to reach inside the spokes and prod the frog again with the key, backed by a series of not carefully chosen yet carefully enunciated words, but the key was too short, the words were too alien and the space was too tight, his greenness gazing at me in that bulgy way, as though thinking 'You're in a hurry, aren't you,' so I went and got a short piece of bamboo (a lot of that around) and poked and prodded him from spoke to spoke, he really didn't want to leave, finally winkling his brightness out of there and onto a nice bouncy plantain leaf where he belonged.

So then I had to avoid the plantain leaf when I was pulling out, and really hotwheel it down the mountain, speedsqueezing past an upcoming truck along the way. Anyhow I made the train, intact and by a whisker, so on the ride into the city to the office and another long day of desk work in exchange for pieces of colored paper with dead politicians' pictures on them I got to think about what a great life that frog must be having right now, up there where I say I live...

Shakin n foldin
the firewood tarp--
frog gets a helluva ride

FROG TAKES WING

This afternoon, while pausing in my digging labors, I glanced perchance at the blue sky and there beheld a small frog spinning languidly, legs outstretched. My eyes followed the amphibian as he plunged earthward and was caught gently by my son, Keech. Before my mouth could fall fully open the frog was airborne again, once more spinning languidly. When my mouth was available I asked Keech what in the world he was doing to the poor frog. "Sky diving," he replied, as the frog went up again. I pointed out that very likely this had never happened to the frog before in his life, or to any of his ancestors, that maybe the frog didn't know how to handle this, and that he might very well throw up all over Keech, but as I looked at the frog coming down again, to be sent up again, I had to admit that his greenness wasn't complaining, he wasn't struggling; in fact, in the moment of stillness at the top of his arc, spinning languidly as before, legs centrifugally outstretched, up there in the sky with the birds and the trees, bulgy eyes taking it all in with a kind of philosophical serenity, I had to admit that the frog appeared to be liking this a lot, and that Keech might actually be doing a very historic favor for the frog family, who will perhaps one day recall him fondly in their myths as the benevolent god who gave them the gift of flight, as the former amphibians soar in their new blueness, high above the mud they once knew as home. Frog had definitely never looked so far downward before; perhaps he was feeling in his breast the unwonted swelling of an unearned pride... We humans know where that can lead.

---First published, in slightly different form, in Kyoto Journal's Inaka issue---