Taking note might prompt some things:
look! Even a colon finds correlation
with the eyes of Hoji’s frog, and the king’s.

The social element’s awkward. I forget
names just offered, let alone ages past.
Wulf, maybe, or Gunnar, or Gunnarson,

son anyway of the longship beached
like a goat locked against the wolves,
the dark that howls up out of itself

on some (have you heard this?) wave
-lashed coast, place of beehive stones
where the candle flames waver,

flare brave again, find the man’s
face as he looks to fish from the mind
what fits the tusk in his sailor’s hand.

Cold blade scores each slow incision
– patience imperative, haste a futility –
chiselling the figure (figurine, really)

its primly seated stance, enfolding robe
and above all this the thrusting face
those astonished bulging eyes,

their fixed beserker stare.
Or was that a sculptor’s joke,
a shipmate’s portrait in the look

of the one who hunches, heavy
headed, beneath the whale-horse
crown? Both hands grip a sword

sheathed safe across the knees
like an instrument of law.
Something’s being assessed.

Whatever the answer, they hauled
back through the surf to open sea
until the chessmen reach the Hebrides,

a Lewis beach burial uncovered, 1831.
Then, Hoji’s frog was seventeen,
its offspring woodblocked in a book.

Still, we can meet the artist, squat
on the workshop mat where he pays
his way by framing other works,

this time working on his own
leaning from the waist, bowed
over the scroll unscrolled and flat

upon the floor, poised with sumi
supple brush to seize the frog from
mind (stillness of an ancient pond )

and so fling it to the open paper.
Note the stroke to style the mouth,
blank space showing belly like an emperor

and those fixated rice bowl eyes.
Must be, must have been, flies
in the studio that Osaka summer.

Frog and king, king and frog,
each in multiple migrations of itself;
here as picture postcards on my wall

the images in their kinship
a duo – and now, reverberating trio –
of looks exchanged, of call, response and call.