summer heat —
mother and I argue
by the beehives
.
_______________________
Mother? Are you reading this? Yes, I know we’ve never argued by any beehives. Don’t worry about it. It’s just a poem.
Love,
your daughter
.
“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
.
.
(See this post for an explanation of what’s going on here.)
Jane:
The Technique of Close Linkage
“… In making any connection between the two parts of a haiku, the leap can be a small and even a well-known one. Usually beginners are easily impressed with close linkage and experiment first with this form. …
winter coldfinding on a beach
an open knife”
The Technique of Leap Linkage
“Then as a writer’s skills increase, and as he or she reads many haiku (either their own or others) such ‘easy’ leaps quickly fade in excitement. Being human animals we seem destined to seek the next level of difficulty and find that thrilling. So the writer begins to attempt leaps that a reader new to haiku may not follow … I think the important point in creating with this technique is that the writer is always totally aware of his or her ‘truth’. … Usually, if you think about the ku long enough and deeply enough, one can find the author’s truth. …
wildflowersthe early spring sunshine
in my hand”
– Jane Reichhold, Haiku Techniques
*
Me:
Okay, the problem I had here is that although I (think I) understand very well what Jane means by the difference between close linkage and leap linkage, and I have certainly seen many ku where the connection was either invisible to me or I had to think really hard to figure it out, I didn’t actually consider the connection in her second ku here to be any more of a leap than the connection in her first ku. So either I’m unusually perspicacious or I didn’t really understand the second ku at all, or maybe even the first.
I’m actually very interested in this because it does seem to me that how and whether people understand haiku depends much on their experiences and frame of mind, and what one person considers to be an obscure connection can be completely obvious to another. I also frequently wonder whether people get a lot of the connections in my ku at all, and whether, if they don’t, it’s my fault or theirs. I think I’m just going to throw a bunch of ku down here in order (more or less) from what I consider closely to distantly linked, and you can tell me whether you agree with me.
pins and needles
she sews a quilt for
the first baby
lines of code
ants march over the
breakfast dishes
spring downpour
eggshells float in
garbage cans
the hair-clogged drain
she whispers something
he can’t hear
speeding up to pass
we never eat anything
he doesn’t like
trimming square
will her mother give her
the money
foggy mirror
her face
or her mother’s