Kokinshu #139
Tuesday, 27 September 2011 07:02![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammer (Topic unknown.)
When I smell the scent
of the flowering orange
that waits for Fifth Month,
it has exactly the scent
of that person's sleeve of old.
satsuki matsu
hanatachibana no
ka o kageba
mukashi no hito no
sode no ka zo suru
---L.
When I smell the scent
of the flowering orange
that waits for Fifth Month,
it has exactly the scent
of that person's sleeve of old.
—17 September 2011
Original author unknown. The tachibana orange, first alluded to back in #121, blooms in what was the lunisolar Fourth Month; the thing about the Fifth Month is personifying the tree as waiting, like the speaker, for the cuckoo (contrast this with #137, where it's the cuckoo that's waiting). The connotation of "a person of old" (mukashi no hito) is someone one was once close to (and in Tales of Ise, the poem is used to taunt a remarried ex-wife into becoming a nun). I can tell I'm developing a sense of Kokinshu aesthetics: the repetition of "scent" clunks something hard, to my ear, even while I admire the carefully balanced future and past experiences.satsuki matsu
hanatachibana no
ka o kageba
mukashi no hito no
sode no ka zo suru
---L.