Few things come back to me with this much clarity.

I am ten. I walk by the shore just outside Kōzu with my two brothers, twins, and five years older than me. It is a cold December day, a blustery wind harassing the waves, pushing them up against the shore in riotous piles. Across the bay to the north Mount Fuji rises up, twenty miles away, perhaps thirty – I am too young to know distances. Its white cap is barely distinguishable from the heavy clouds, only a certain solidity marking where its sweeping sides begin and the grey mist ends.

My desire for there to be an afterlife

equals my conviction there isn’t one,

sing as one may, alone or in unison,

“When we all get to heaven.”

A heaven less screwed up than earth

where we long, and love and hurt.

An eternal present from which we look

down at the past; everyone has one

and everyone’s isn’t exactly alike.