I wanted to see what happens when a linked-verse Renku from a traditional snowbound mountain village in 18^th century Japan is moved to a contemporary American urban landscape, and somewhere in the middle of that work I realized I wasn’t translating the poem. I was translating the room.

Renku is built on one discipline: a poet writes a verse, and the next verse answers it — not repeating it, not ignoring it, but finding real contact with what came before and turning it somewhere new.

A modern cypher runs on the same principle. Someone spits a verse. The next catches the thread and carries it forward, live, with nothing to hide behind. No stage, no script. Renku, it turns out, was never attached to snow and temple bells. It’s attached to a discipline of listening and answering. Move that discipline into a different room — an alley instead of a mountain path, a DJ instead of a fiddle — and the poem doesn’t break. It just tells the truth about a different place and time.

What follows are two half-kasen written as a pair: Wolf Moon, in the tradition’s old landscape, and Coyote Moon, its answer, in present-day city urban America. Read together, each responds to the other. Read alone, each still stands. Both circle the same question: what happens when a man carrying a private grief is finally pulled into a room where people are making something together — and someone hands him the thread?