(Artwork by Rick Daddario, 19 Planets)
.
sap rising
three or four gumballs
in my pockets
.
pockets
March 9: What I Lost (Haibun)
.
“If you want to see Dad before he dies, come now,” my sister tells me. “You can’t believe the pain he’s in.” I hang up, make the flight reservations and pack. Then, jittery with nervous energy, I note that there’s just time for me to go for a quick run before I need to leave for the airport.
I put my cell phone in my pocket before I set off, in case my sister has anything else to tell me.
childhood summers —
he combs my tangled hair
painlessly
The sidewalks are coated with ice. I try to run carefully. But a cardinal darts from a branch hanging across the walk, a flash of red that pulls my attention into the sky. Suddenly, I’m on my back, pain in every part of me, afraid, for just a minute, to try to move.
But I force myself to my feet and set off running again, even faster now, despite the ice, because of the ice. I’m young, I’m strong, no cancer will ever worm its way into me and break my bones from the inside out. I’m about to get on a plane and rise thirty-five thousand feet in the air and descend, alive, a thousand miles away.
Nothing else can ever hurt me.
deep inside
the snowbank —
a cell phone rings
.
_______________________________
.
First published in Notes from the Gean 2:4, March 2011
.
.
Pseudohaiku: Search strings
what dives
in the water
red as a cardinal
usual syllables
haiku
for venus
haiku monastery
seen because flowers
have gone
folding knives
and pockets
in france
antique geisha screenprint
missing
left hands
____________________
It’s the end of a long, draining week. I thought we (at least we here in the U.S.) could all use some entertainment, and an opportunity to take ourselves not quite as seriously as usual.
So: The thing all these haiku have in common is that, clearly, they are not haiku. They are some of the eccentric search strings that have led people to this page from Google. I like to entertain myself by trying to imagine what was going through people’s minds when they entered these searches, and by what tortured logic the search engine directed them here in a vain attempt to fulfill their information needs.
I have a large collection of other search strings, most of which do not lend themselves so easily to being converted to pseudohaiku. Some of them are quite beautiful, though. Some are thought-provoking, probably in a way their author did not intend. Some I’m thinking of using as writing prompts in the future. (“Poems about bad wolves”? Yeah, I would read a poem about bad wolves.)
Here are a few of them. Enjoy. And take a few deep breaths this weekend.
the dragonfly land on you will they bite me or sting me
garden, fog, crescent moon, and stars
full moon and sleepless nights
haiku dragon shy rock
poems about bad wolves
why are the dragonflies red
why was the moon red last night
meaning of seeing a red dragonfly
“anxiety” “rustling leaves” “simile”
snowboarding villanelles
caterpillar incense cedar sphinx
October 15: 1-5 (Geese fly), and A Short Discourse on Kigo
geese fly —
towing darkness
behind them
geese fly —
change dribbles
out of my pocket
geese fly —
this lover, too,
is cold
geese fly —
down trickles
out of our pillow
geese fly —
haiku etched
in the sky
_____________________
I wrote half a dozen more of these, but I wouldn’t inflict them on my suffering public. Fortunately I have a lot of other things to do today or I would probably sit here in a trance free-associating on flying geese all day.
I don’t always use kigo in my haiku nor do I think they’re always necessary or even desirable, but whenever I start to think that they’re an artificial and burdensome construct that should just be tossed out altogether, I go read Basho and Issa and those other long-ago poets who basically created this genre. I’ve been making my way through the David Lanoue-translated Issa: Cup of Tea Poems and that guy (Issa) riffs on kigo like jazz. He takes a kigo like “night cold” or “winter rain” (pages 80 and 81, in case you’re interested) and uses it like a chord, putting it into so many different contexts and surrounding it with so many different tones that you hardly even notice the same phrase has been used in many successive ku. That’s when you start realizing that kigo can actually be the basis for creativity rather than a hindrance to it.
_____________________
Oh, and hey — don’t forget to send me haiku for my 300th post.
September 18: Giving haibun another shot
Persephone
March in Moscow — snow not melting yet. Everything I see that muddied shade of ash I call Communist Gray. My only solace the white marble and gold leaf of the metro stations — all that richness, so deep underground. I stand by the tracks closing my eyes as the breeze of the train sweeps my face. Where I come from, spring feels like this.
I wonder if he’ll miss me when I’m gone.
onion seeds
deep in my pocket
warm tickets
_____________________________________
Steve Mitchell of Heed Not Steve and I made a humorous pact to write one haibun that we didn’t hate by the fall equinox. He went and jumped the gun on me though and posted his today (you should check it out, it’s pretty good). So I said, “Fine, be that way,” and took a deep breath and posted one of the ones I’ve been working on this week.
I don’t hate it. I don’t say I like it. I think Persephone probably deserves better. But I don’t hate it.
I think this will be one of a series — I’ve already written another but the haiku part is giving me some lip so I’m having to talk sternly to it. Watch this space for more installments.
(And she may not want to be associated with this effort in any way, but thanks to Roberta Beary for her excellent example and for the inspiring and informative haibun workshop she led last weekend in Mineral Point.)
Red Dragonfly 
