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winter sky
snipping out stars
for the children
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see haiku here, 8 January 2012
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(This haiga is a lot bigger and more impressive-looking at Kuniharu Shimizu’s blog, so click on that link up there to see it there. That way you can also see the whole sequence of haiga Kuni san did about children, and the related sequence he’s working on now, about toys.)
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standing at one point
of a triangle
evening snow
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Presence #45
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(I wrote this last August at Haiku North America during Eve Luckring’s amazing workshop on “Video Renku: Link and Shift in Visual Language.” I was responding to a visual prompt of a photograph that depicted, as far as I can remember, three bath products lined up on a shelf in a chilly-looking tiled bathroom. [It’s not as prosaic as it sounds. It was art.] We were supposed to be responding not to the content — the subject — of the photo but to its structure, visual elements like patterns and colors and numbers of objects. We were supposed to be “linking” our poem to the photograph in the sometimes ineffable way that two verses in a renku are linked.
I really, really have to do that exercise again. I’ve been saying that for six months now. Nag me until I actually do it.)
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everyChristmas everyChristmasisthesame lights strung to evade the unavoidable dark, pine sap coating your fingers and the angels and the spun glass balls, paper keeps piling up on the floor and you begin to worry that something is lost beneath it but no matter how hard you look you can’t find anything but boxes with nothing in them and dry pine needles and the day moves toward dark no matter how many lights you light or how many fires you feed with paper and pine needles, thin dissatisfied fires with thin music circling them, and no matter how little you get you can never give away enough to make you feel better about it, and then you remember that something was born.
the morning after
you get what you want
empty stocking
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Very very slowly but also very quickly. That’s how the world ended and always will.
first day of winter –
is glass a solid
or a liquid?
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So there’s a calendar that has haiku on it. Maybe there’s more than one. The one I know about is published by Snapshot Press and you can find out about it here. It looks really cool but I haven’t actually seen it yet. I plan to order one or two soon though because it contains this haiku of mine. I’ve posted it here before but what the heck. The first snow will probably be showing up sometime soon around here, so it’s timely. Also, I wanted to let you know about the whole calendar thing well in advance of Christmas so you can order some for all the people you normally give fruitcake to. In the interests of world peace and all that.
Incidentally, I based this very loosely on this haiku by Basho:
秋深き 隣は何を する人ぞ
aki fukaki tonari wa nani wo suru hito zo
Deep autumn—
my neighbor,
how does he live, I wonder?
— Basho, tr. R.H. Blyth
(And how I have managed to go so long without finding the Classical Japanese Database from which the transcription and translation above are taken, I have absolutely no idea. Kudos to Carl Johnson for putting this amazing resource together.)
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(Artwork by Rick Daddario, 19 Planets)
The cemetery is full of trees. How do they dig the graves? You couldn’t get a backhoe between the trunks. Are there still gravediggers here, men with shovels making dark jokes about the things they unearth in the course of their work? I think about dying here and what it would be like to lie with my head against one set of roots and my feet against another. With a rock over my chest that told everyone my foreign name. People would walk back and forth over me, murmuring, in a tongue not my own, the first and last years I was alive. For decades I would dream my life, until the gravediggers retrieved me, held me up to the light, let the sun shine through my skull.
last frost
my footprint melted
into the soil
.
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We like to visit a co-op cafe in our Moscow neighborhood, one of the new private enterprises that Gorbachev has encouraged; they have more and better food than most of the state restaurants, and are never “Closed for Repairs” when the employees feel like taking a day off, never display “No Vacancy” signs when the place is empty. The staff are solicitous and polite, and apologetic if something on the menu doesn’t happen to be available, instead of incredulous that you might ever have expected it would be.
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winter flea market —
a wind-up doll
that’s already broken.
It drives the staff crazy if I order for myself instead of letting my boyfriend do it for me. For this reason, I make a point of always ordering for myself, and always before he does. They stare ferociously at him while I speak, and only after he gives a slight nod do they write down my order. Even after I’ve been doing this for months, they don’t yield on their principles. No one there ever asks me what I want.
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I eat my chicken Kiev watching them as they bustle from table to table with worried lines in their foreheads, as if they’re calculating profit margins in their heads. Butter drips down my chin. My boyfriend reaches over and wipes it off with a napkin.
.
meteor shower
the wishes I make
in another language.
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.— Haibun Today 5:2, June 2011
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The main post office on Gorky Street in Moscow. A line of squat beige phones — a line of people in thick coats to their ankles standing beside them. Staring at them like half-boiled pots, waiting for them to ring. Waiting to hear the voice of someone from the other side of the Iron Curtain.
You’ve filled in the required forms. When do you want to talk? Whom do you want to talk to? For how long would you like this conversation to continue? Be careful: they’ll give you exactly the amount of time you ask for, no more and no less. But the phones are ringing, your mind is buzzing, you can only make awkward, half-thought-through calculations.
Not long after our phones ring and we lift the receivers to our ears like stones, we realize we answered all the questions wrong. The conversations should have been earlier or later, longer or shorter. The people we are talking to are not people we really know. We’ve forgotten the languages they’re speaking. We live in different countries for what we now know is forever, though we meant it to be temporary. “Wait —” we say. “It’s about to end —”
The phone makes a noise that means my life has returned to me. Everything goes silent until it’s the next person’s turn. Down the line, feet shuffle, stirring the hems of coats.
.
melting snow —
letting go
of what I meant to say
___________________________________________________________________________
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(Chrysanthemum 9, April 2011)
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spring planting
the history book open
to the last page.(NaHaiWriMo topic: History)
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When I gave this prompt, I suspected it might cause a little angst for some people who saw it as overly abstract or intellectual for haiku. And in fact, one person (whom I respect enormously as a person and a poet) did wonder whether haiku on this topic weren’t “desk haiku,” haiku based more on ideas than images. I understand why people might feel that way — the word “history” sounds so abstract, so theoretical. It might seem as if I’m asking for a term paper instead of a poem.
But the classical haiku poets didn’t shy away from historical topics — perhaps the most famous example being Basho’s haiku written after his visit to the site of a famous historic battle:
summer grass …
those mighty warriors’
dream tracks— Basho, translated by William H. Higginson
There’s also Buson’s deathbed verse:
Winter warbler —
long ago in Wang Wei’s
hedge also— Buson, translated by Robert Hass
I think maybe for some people history is a very textbook kind of thing; it doesn’t seem real to them, not in the same way that the events of their own daily life do. But as soon as these events happen — they pass into the realm of history. History isn’t all politics, philosophy, sociology — it’s the clothes people wore when you were a child, it’s the squat, homely horse Abe Lincoln rode to review the troops during the Civil War, it’s the birds that were singing right before the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, it’s what your mother gave you for breakfast the morning JFK was shot. It’s the world, the whole concrete world of concrete details, the one that haiku poets cherish, only in the past.
This is how I responded on the NaHaiWriMo Facebook page when this prompt was called into question:
“Maybe I’m weird — history for me is about images a lot more than ideas, but then I tend to think in pictures a lot. For instance, when someone says ‘the battles of Lexington and Concord’ to me, I don’t start thinking about battle strategy or the philosophical underpinnings of the Revolution, I start thinking about the field in Concord where the battle was, which I’ve visited; there’s a great wooden bridge there and the grass is very green in the summer, and it’s not far from Walden Pond, where there’s a stone cairn in the woods on the site of Thoreau’s cabin…
the battle site
children run back and forth
across the bridge
.the cries of swimmers
we add one more stone
to his grave”
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________________________
Anyway: Moving on:
NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 19th
Wind
See this post for an explanation of what this is.
See the NaHaiWriMo website.
See the NaHaiWriMo Facebook page, and contribute haiku there if you want. (It doesn’t have to have anything to do with this prompt. It’s just a suggestion.)
anniversary
we argue about which way
the snow is falling
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First published in The Mainichi Daily News, Feb. 22, 2011
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(Special thanks to Aubrie Cox for letting me know this poem had appeared in print — after six weeks I still hadn’t noticed. Now go look at Aubrie’s doodle haiga.)
___________________________
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Husband: But our anniversary is in August. And why would we argue about anything so stupid?
Me: No, no, dear, I meant the other guy I’ve been married to for twenty years.
Husband: Oh.
…
February
you bake me a sweet cake
in a sugarless country
.
skiing in Gorky Park—
suddenly realizing
where we’re going
.
March
a snowstorm
settles it
.
April
babushkas chiding us
for our warmth
.
May
blossoming
at last
.
_________________________________
Happy birthday, honey.
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I didn’t have anything today. I wanted to post but I just was … empty. I was sick of my voice. Didn’t feel like talking anymore.
Then I looked around at my family and suddenly thought, These are the voices I want to hear instead. So we went out for pizza and I took a notebook and I solicited phrases from them. Phrases about what had happened to them this week and about the first signs of spring. We talked about stuff and I kept writing things down. Lots of scribbling and dead ends.
We got home and I looked at the scribbles and I put some things together and read everyone a haiku I had assembled from the pieces they gave me. I made sure they approved of them. And here they are.
.
_______________________________
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My mom (visiting from New England, where are stone walls all over the place, including her back yard):
snow melting
my stone wall
reappears
.
My husband (spent last weekend cleaning frantically to prepare for my mom’s visit; has terrible teeth):
spring cleaning
the last tooth
capped
.
My son (claims he told me a long time ago that he needs new boots):
slush
new holes
in my old boots
_______________________________
So what’s your family up to these days? Anything worth writing home about?
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“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
.
_______________________________
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First published in Notes from the Gean 2:4, March 2011
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Forward
March: It’s not just about the wind.
Light from the sun reaches us
and keeps going.
Raindrops flow like glass on glass.
My son is tracing circuit diagrams
on the back of a page from Hamlet.
We all dream that way sometimes.
When you climb a mountain
it divides the day.
Spring at the bottom and
winter at the top.
I pick up the phone, put it down again.
It’s not the right season to go backward.
I wish some year I’d remember
to write down the date
I hear the first bird sing.
Once a red-tailed hawk
moved into our neighborhood
and surveyed the chipmunks for days
before deciding to move on.
Don’t tell me you’ve never been tempted
to stay too long.
I’m sure there’s a song about that.
The equinox is coming:
are you equal to it?
This is when we realize
that snow is water.
That ice is light.
That every day the sun reaches us
at a slightly different angle:
March.
.
________________
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So I’m really busy this week. Really. Insanely. Busy. Right now I should be doing six other things. Going to bed being one of them. Every minute for the last week I should have been doing six other things. A lot of those minutes I spent writing poetry instead. I’m hopeless that way.
At one point I guess I decided that it wasn’t enough to jot down a haiku or two in my off minutes, I needed to write a longer poem instead, one that would require some concentrated effort and allow me to put off my much more boring tasks for as long as possible. So I wrote this. Sorry.
.
winter dream
you and the moon
disappear together
____________________
First posted at Haiku Bandit Society for the Feb. 2011 Moon Viewing Party.
Willie Sorlien, owner and proprietor over at Haiku Bandit Society, linked the last line to a great Traffic video. Go watch it, it’s pretty much in the spirit of the haiku, and the video has cool images of its own.
Red Dragonfly 