Hi again - KUFS



hi again

here are the non-roster nominations for the first roster for 2009

eliminate everything but the titles of those items you wish to vote for

thanks again

j

***

001. Well-Bucket Nightfall, or New Day?

                 

We don’t always know about it while we’re going through life’s major switch points. For this brief essay, I want to use the Japanese season word “well-bucket nightfall” (tsurube-otoshi) as a sort of anti-theme. The theme is set in October, when dusk seems to swoop down suddenly on a world only a few minutes ago filled with the end of a busy day’s activities. The image itself, now certainly metaphorical for most Japanese (and probably all haiku poets!), comes from agrarian village life, where a people drew water from their wells to prepare for evenings’ activities. One moment, the bucket is there on top. The next, plunged into darkness.

 

While I do not have this same rural experience—my grandmother’s well responded to a hand-pump in her kitchen—I love the remembered taste of that sweet well water from my early childhood, how great it tasted after the exertion of the pump. And later, the taste of a spring we found on a nearby hillside after the water in the well went bad. Well, a small flight from rural Japan to rural Connecticut, such as the mind of an old man might make.

 

Is this, then, to be the journal of my own well-bucket nightfall, when my own life will be snuffed out in a few weeks’ time? Or the journal of a dark night to a bright new day? I have lived a long and productive life, to my own understanding, lived much of it on my own terms, much on the pure dumb luck of some accidental word or event no one could have predicted. Who could know that a single verse spoken in an endless  year of USAF Japanese vocabulary drills relating to parts of weapons and flying airplanes would lead to a life-long interest in

Japanese poetry that has sustained me through all the rest.

 

                            smell of bile . . .

                            I waken to October

                            afterglow

 

                             October afterglow . . .

                            will my lucky star

                            shine tonight?

 

                            hospital window

                            in the clear dawn sky

                            one full moon

 

 

002. Fixture

                

Mother handles the jacket in the Dutch Colonial armoire as if to deprive it of independence. In Father’s hurry to leave for good one afternoon, he had forgotten his favorite jacket. It hung there for three years before she decided to do something about it. Each morning, Mother reduces the jacket’s control over her by sliding it at will to a different part of the rail. She then slams the teakwood door only to open it a little as though to let the thing air:

 

                            deserted . . .

                            wool strands

                            frayed and tangled

 

 

 

003. Strong As Ever

        

        

The horse from the drawing I did not buy because I could not come up with the sum needed fast enough still visits my dreams.

 

                        a stump in spring

                           the scent of cherry

                        strong as ever

 

 

004. Sea of Stars

                 

 

As a father, it’s in my nature to enjoy the idea that my toddler children think I have supreme knowledge of the secrets of the universe.  Most of the time, I have no idea what the answers are to the questions they pose, but somehow I manage to tell them something that satisfies their curiosity.  At the moment, my three year-old son has paralyzed me with his latest inquiry, “How do starfish poop?”

 

                            country night

                            clinging to a rock

                          in a sea of stars

 

 

005. Popcorn, or Notes for a Fairy Tale

 

My wife, having had to fight the traffic, returns late from a conference in Shanghai and I make some popcorn. Our son crawls out of his lair to share in the feast while she tells us all about technology in the classroom. We get to the bottom of the bowl and consider the unpopped kernels. I decide to pop some more and our son tells us why he thought the school dance last week was a flop. We get to the bottom of the second bowl and I suggest a third. It’s all about trebling, I explain, like in a fairy tale. But no one is interested in a third bowl and we all drift away to our private happily-ever-afters.

 

                           the patter of rain

                           rereading Goldilocks

                           in my own bed

 

 

006. Aural Experience: Sound and Rhythm in the Haiku of 

 

These days Nicholas Virgilio is celebrated for two haiku in particular, both of which, it is universally agreed, helped change the way in which haiku was practiced.

 

      Lily:                                         Bass

         out of the water . . .                  picking bugs

             out of itself                               off the moon

    

These often-anthologized poems demonstrated how spare haiku could be, and the techniques were imitated and perfected by those many haiku poets who followed. In recent years, however, much else of Virgilio’s work has been neglected, and the mass of it is never reprinted, with the regular exception perhaps of half a dozen pieces. The current, and apparently widespread view amongst many editors, is that the bulk of Virgilio’s haiku lack subtlety to their message and are long and over-wordy in comparison to today’s practice. On the surface it is hard to disagree with this view, and many admirers of Virgilio find his body of work sadly and largely disdained as some outdated fossil.

 

Although Virgilio is remembered for these two haiku, both being lean and direct in their execution, the larger corpus of his haiku is wordier, often demonstrative of both rhythm and rhyme, and other aural effects nowadays deemed self-consciously poetic. Within some schools of thought, obvious musicality in haiku is generally considered as inappropriate to contemporary practice.

 

The following brief examination of some of Virgilio’s haiku  is to demonstrate that many function, to this writer’s mind at least, as capsule melodies, and to pose the question: is it really necessary to reject overt music in haiku in order to maintain its integrity and purity of form?

 

Virgilio’s first appearance in American Haiku, 1963, was with a poem obvious in its rhythm and rhyme:

 

                  Spring wind frees

                  the full moon tangled

                  in leafless trees

 

But rhyme and rhythm were something he retained throughout his haiku career, deepening the sophistication of its practice as he progressed as a poet:

 

                  one wild apple

                  ripples the rain puddle:

                  evening sun

 

The combination of those fluid consonants (the conjoined ps, ds and ls) gives us a tonal rippling that’s physically palpable. Although the word ripple is said only once, the reader experiences three ripplings, in the words apple, ripples, puddle.  Interesting, also, is how the poem begins and ends on the same resonantly hard consonant of the en sound; like something being struck, although in this case

water. This effect is further added to by the placement of that same hard consonant towards the end of the middle line. The governance of speed is such that the spacing of all those in-

termediary open vowels allows a breathing between each rippling. Such balanced chiming as occurs in this haiku reveals beyond any doubt an ear sensitive to tonal effect.

 

A similar effect of sound, but far more subtle, is achieved in

 

                      the knifegrinder’s bell

                      fades in the afternoon heat:

                      cicada

 

The word bell is embedded, lost almost, between knifegrinder and afternoon heat. Tonal distance, the time it takes for the word bell to appear and then be left behind, adds to the effect of sound-loss described in the haiku. And that final word, cicada, with its soft echoic qualities, accentuates the idea of a fading bell. All this works side by side with the actual expressed meaning of the poem: a bell’s sound fades in the afternoon heat, while the cicada resonates, becomes the new chiming.

 

                      always returning

                      to the turd on the tombstone:

                      cemetery flies

 

In this we observe not just the obvious alliteration of turd and tombstone, but also the wonderfully balanced ticking of those t-sounds in the first and final lines. Because of the preceding weak stresses the four initial t-sounds in returning, turd, tombstone and cemetery are equally placed, with tombstone containing that extra, riding t.

 

In many current haiku schools of thought such overt rhythmic and alliterative usage is largely frowned upon. This following haiku in particular would be very easy to dismiss by today’s standards of composition, because it contains very obvious alliteration and rhyme:

 

                      her photograph fades:

                      the widower at the window

                      shadows the torn shade  

 

A further negative would be that it’s 5-7-5. (I’m making an educated guess here that Virgilio intended the pronunciation of widower to be elided, otherwise the haiku becomes hyper-syllabic.) However, at what point can we safely discard poetic effect in any body of poetics?

 

Looking again at this haiku we cannot but fail to be aware of its atmospheric resonance. Because of the very language employed, the very obviously poetic devices, and the retarded speed in which it’s delivered, the slow motion, the slurring caused by that alliteration, this haiku is haunted by its central image. And as we read it we are as haunted by that dead woman as the widower is.

 

Hauntings were something that Virgilio was quite good at, and they reappear throughout his work. Little wonder, really, for he was haunted himself:

 

                     my dead brother . . .

                     hearing his laugh

                     in my laughter 

 

A perfect senryu, I would venture, managing to be both bitter and joyous in the one breath. This is a poem that wouldn’t be remiss in any contemporary haiku journal, but let us not ignore the fact that it contains both rhyme and repetition, some of the things we’ve learnt in our apprenticeships to discard. The trick of the craft, however, is to know when it’s right to retain something.  In structure this particular senryu is syllabically symmetrical, being 4-4-4, and its stresses are fairly regular.  And that symmetry, I would argue, helps to convey the shock that’s experienced by the reader who starts with an encounter of death and ends with the sound of laughter. The effect is accentuated because the poem is confined in such a tight, enclosed box.

 

The death of Virgilio’s younger brother in Viet Nam had a profound consequence on his work. His poetry became darker, nature appeared less innocent.

 

                     beneath the coffin

                     at the edge of the open grave:

                     the crushed young grass

 

Metaphor is inescapable here, yet the metaphor is strengthened by the sounds running through the poem: beneath the coffin is soft, insidious; and that final line, the crushed young grass is sibilant, oozing betrayal.

 

Control of speed, a timed steering of his poetry, is evident in yet another of his elegies to his lost brother:

 

                        my dead brother . . .

                        wearing his gloves and boots

                        I step into deep snow

 

All poems end where they end, as do all sentences, all things. But this haiku doesn’t merely end. It is end-stopped. And it stops us up. The rhythm of the second line is such that it delivers itself quickly to the reader, yet with step and deep we are held up, until finally, with the word snow, the poem literally sinks. In reading the final line we take those steps, interpenetrate with Virgilio’s stopping.

 

Language not only has meaning, not only rhythm, but its sounds often suggest movement, for many words mimic what they describe.

 

                         rising and falling . . .

                           a blanket of blackbirds feeds

                        on the snowy slope

 

Here the alliteration, Virgilio’s favourite effect, as well as the rhythm, caused by the groupings of weak and strong stresses, suggests movement, covering, and finally (with snowy slope) soft, temporary ground. In this haiku everything is in motion, yet Virgilio manages to end on an image of stillness, without, it should be said, actually stating that anything has stopped.

 

Not all of his haiku were presented in three lines, but his usage of devices was, admittedly, much the same throughout most of his work:

her shadow shaving the hair from its legs: the heat

 

The most common criticism aimed at him, however, is that his devices can be obvious, and the haiku compromised as a result:

 

                  approaching autumn:

                  the warehouse watchdog’s bark

                  weakens in the wind

 

If the above haiku were presented at a poetry workshop in these more sophisticated times, it would probably be edited mercilessly. The alliteration would more than likely be toned down, if not eradicated completely. That would be a pity, for we would be depriving ourselves of a small song. Virgilio’s work is peppered with such songs, all following a tradition of haiku practice that in times gone by was considered quite normal. In the attempt to objectify the capturing of the haiku moment such approaches as Virgilio’s were abandoned. In our age, it seems, we see no need to return to them.

 

In his introduction to Virgilo’s Selected Haiku (1988), Rod Willmot picks out the above haiku to point up how the alliterative w suggests the woof of the barking dog, but also (Willmot falling prone to alliteration himself) how it further suggests “something weak and whining” about the creature in question. None of this can be denied, and there is an innocent and indulgent pleasure in enjoying the effects of sound in this wonderful little poem. The same pleasure we find in most popular song and verse. Which brings us to another of Virgilio’s perceived sins: his facility of craft, his ease of accessibility to a general readership.

 

Rod Willmot quotes a later, and much sharper haiku that uses similar effect:

 

                  barking its breath

                  into the rat-hole:

                  bitter cold

 

As Willmot, and not fancifully I think, points out, the repeated alliterative b here also denotes a snapping bark. Here we have a haiku that wouldn’t be out of place in a modern journal, but one that still utilizes the poetic effect and devices of sound.

 

Of course, one must not forget that Virgilio also experimented with minimalism, which he could employ quite effectively for political satire:

 

                              spentagon

                              pentagony

                              repentagon

 

or as an expression of transformation, as in:

 

                              Hiroshimagined

 

And even in minimalism he did not abandon the roots of haiku as nature poem:

 

                              nowl

 

However, it is neither in such minimalism, nor in the tight constructions of the anthology favourites, that Virgilio’s work typically resides, but in the small songs, the one-verse alliterative hymns to nature and to experience, his tiny sculptures of sound and atmosphere. It is in these that we find his true legacy.

 

                           the first snowfall:

                           down the cellar staircase

                           my father calls

 

 

007. A Museo dei Barbari

 

I.

 

Like a metalworker buried with his tools I sleep content to have sharp useful things around me. My city was born in the multiple mouths of two rivers. It costs me everything but is worth this steady factoring down. Lightning loops listless, biting letters into drowning surfaces, slumming on the balconies in slow scale patterns, scrawls over palaces. It is worth getting wet to throw coins that catch in the capsized mirrors and chandeliers. Tonight I met a fleet of prisoners coming back from the island and was strongly rebuked for the polite forms I used to address a strapping dark eyed ephebe. Fancy was once the word for imagination, streets lit by tiny oil lamps, one in every shrine … I carve hunting scenes into the sarcophagus of every moment, bless the fish hook earrings you pressed into my hand when you left by the water door.

 

            midnight shop

            carnival masks

   still unpainted

 

 

II..

 

                        No great chain is drawn across the Grand Canal, no mines placed in the lagoons, as the skyscraper pleasure ships swamp the piers.

 

You wear out,  you wear down, so beautifully… what you worship,  what you are buried with, what you would settle for, what you sleep with…

 

at the center of the labyrinth

a sea gull

eviscerates a pigeon

 

 

 III.

At the next table the voluptuous sound of unknown language, young officer with a barrel echo voice and sense of accomplished masculinity. The girlfriend listlessly disassembles a cigarette while he chuckles into a cell phone. You are in disguise in these drab, loose- fitting clothes. You keep sweating through them, as your voice sweats through your language….

 

all the piercing colors

a cat crosses a wall

of glass shards

 

 

                      IV.

 

Not the Annunciation Simone Martino expected, reporters swarm,

semi-nude blonde American model posing in a bikini for a local TV commercial in the quattrocento piazza when the soccer player cuts a diagonal across the square, a battle of beauty, Ercole at the Crossroads, yellow shorts soaked with sweat, bandages on left wrist and right ankle. I want to sink to your level, Venice

 

                                    At the Museo dei Barbari

erect penis gripped in his left hand --

god

 

 

 

008. Platinum Print

 

The nude woman kneels on a bed as if in prayer. Light through the northern window washes over her profile.

 

She cradles herself, barely able to clasp the slightly shadowed belly in the shape of a tear, full to overflowing.

 

another summer -

I keep on growing

into my mother

 

 

 

009. Cameo

 

She died before I was born, having destroyed the last traces of herself - diaries, photographs, letters - in a fury of flames. 

 

Only once did my grandfather speak of her—the woman that he betrayed. He pressed a cameo in my palm. "Your grandmother" he said after awhile, dismissing me by abruptly turning away. 

 

I stroke the profile of a coral face with wavy hair streaming beyond her shoulders. How I  long to know this stranger in silhouette.

 

moonlight -

I step into a shadow

of myself

 

 

 

010. 3009

 

Six rules written for a new paradigm, 2009:

Break the door into two neat pieces. Bring water to the river. Eat only powdered donuts. Call your mother. Paint honey on your face and stand in the woods. Yodel.

 

A thousand years from now, two shepherds (there are always shepherds) will discover the six rules written on good paper, penned by a woman, six rules preserved in a cave (it is always a cave). The shepherds will yell to their neighbors that something valuable has been unearthed. What wisdom, an old woman will say. This is exactly what we needed, a young father will say, hefting his fat son onto his shoulders. The six rules will be copied and passed from village to village. Doors will be broken exactly in half, rainwater caught in buckets and carried four miles to the river. Scholars will look for the foodstuff: powdered donuts, in cookbooks saved in museums. Everyone calls his or her mother. Most paint their faces. Few wait in the woods. When the sun rises, the people bow to the earth to give thanks to the woman who penned the rules. Yodel, they’ll say, we honor you.

 

we are deep

within the well of history

drowning

 

 

 

011.  Fixture

 

Mother handles the jacket in the Dutch Colonial armoire as if to deprive it of independence. In Father’s hurry to leave for good one afternoon, he had forgotten his favorite jacket. It hung there for three years before she decided to do something about it. Each morning, Mother reduces the jacket’s control over her by sliding it at will to a different part of the rail. She then slams the teakwood door only to open it a little as though to let the thing air:

 

          deserted . . .

          wool strands

          frayed and tangled

 

 

 

012. Amos

 

The summer I worked with Amos at the vineyard on Orcutt Road I stayed at my aunt and uncle’s house.  Amos lived by the creek bed, in an old camper up on cinderblocks. “If the Border Patrol comes by, say, ‘no comprendo’,” my uncle told me; “you’ll get a free ride to Tijuana.” Amos thought that was funny; thinking about me leaving put him in a good mood. I remember him in his doorway at dawn, reaching down with sunburned arms to put a fried egg and Tabasco sauce on a step for the dog. Around back—a barrel full of crushed beer cans, and a dirt bathtub lined with plastic trash bags. Sometimes he dreamed about ‘Nam, and woke up yelling. Afterward, he gave Ed the Indian a hard time, or got in fights in the valley bars. 

 

He’s gone now. My uncle said he went to Oklahoma to help out on his family’s farm. Now that we’re in another war, I think about  Amos, the way he got quiet sometimes, his hands tending the plants but remembering other actions.

 

            Tracking a hawk

             into the sun—

             flame in a tin lantern

 

 

 

Revelations: Unedited

 

I was a bit apprehensive when asked to contribute to this column because I don’t think there is a “secret” to writing haiku—at least not one that I know. Each poem is its own moment and is approached from a different angle and mindset, so any “secret” must take these mathematically large possibilities into mind. Flexibility any one “secret” would have difficulty achieving. That said I do have a couple things I try to keep in mind when I write.

 

The first is easily (and often) said but was perhaps the hardest to learn: Try to approach poetry with openness to experience, leaving all preconceptions behind. I believe strongly in experiential haiku and an insistence on letting things talk for themselves. In the past I have argued that from a reader’s perspective wholly made up poems are indistinguishable from experiential ones, so there shouldn’t be a stigma against desk-ku, in fact it shouldn’t even be a topic of discussion; that perspective, however, is from the reader’s point of view. As a writer, I want to expand my knowledge of the world and myself. A poem that is wholly made up, while possibly successful in a reader’s eye, is only successful to my writer’s ego. For me this was a hard lesson to learn because I was raised in a society in which we are taught that things mean other things. Stars and tea leaves tell our fortunes. A black cat can’t cross my path without my recognizing it as a bad omen. This symbolism is equally true regarding literature. I was taught that Frost’s “Stopping by Woods...” is not about stopping to watch the snow fall, but is about the meaning of land ownership. So I learned to approach poetry as if the poet was saying, “Let me tell you something through something else.” Further, there is a whole network of journals and websites that want our poems, and that we want to be published in. Editors we want to impress. So our first instinct is to show off, to tell the editor

something amazing. We think of the end result first. We thinkof meaning. “I’m going to write a poem about a cow chewing cud juxtaposed with a co-worker because I’m trying to show... etc...” But   instead of leading with what I am trying to say, with what I want the objects to say, I should listen to the objects themselves. 

 

What is remarkable about letting an object speak for itself is that it allows you to discover something new about it. You will never find anything new, much less report on anything new, if you approach your subjects with your mind already made up. Poetry should be about discovery and each true thing deserves more than my preconceptions. Fay Aoyagi said at a recent HPNC reading that she liked “the idea of everything—a tree, a flower, a lake, a stone and a house—having its own spirit.” I couldn’t agree more. It is our job as poets to find that spirit. Equally remarkable about letting an object speak for itself is that it allows you to potentially discover something new about yourself—to find your spirit. Years ago I wrote the poem,

 

      daffodil shoots—

    all these years

    as an accountant

 

I had been walking up the front path of our house and noticed that the daffodil shoots had started to come up. This wasn’t surprising since I had planted the bulbs. But as someone who was raised on the beaches of Southern California I am fascinated with the emergence of spring in wintry New England. I found myself wondering about the internal clock of daffodils and was oddly surprised that some bulbs in exact situations were slightly different in their timing. I could have easily walked by the bulbs and thought in my accountant mindset that they were right on schedule. Instead, by taking the time to look at a few bulbs among the many, I discovered something new about bulbs, and also about myself. It was a lesson to be less that accountant.

 

Poetry is a balancing act. As writers we are all misunderstood. That is fortunately(!) the nature of the short poem. Words are abstractions, so the less words we use, the more abstract and general our poems become—and more open to reader interpre-

tation. And haiku are the least wordy poems! It is important toemember that each poem is two poems: the writer’s and the 

reader’s. As a writer I want to express my discovery in just enough words to lead the reader to discover what I did, but I don’t want to tell them too much or they lose their discovery. Follow this poem of mine through its specifics:

 

bird call bird call loon call

a boulder a boulder supports a boulder supports

stairs stairs from the lake stairs from the lake

 

I obviously didn’t write the poem this way, but I think it is useful to illustrate how our perceptions change as the poem gets more specific? Perhaps you heard a crow or songbird in the first two versions? Or placed the poem in the desert. In a perfect world, my discovery would balance the reader’s discovery. But that is often not true. But because that happens, it doesn’t mean either side failed. Perhaps the reader’s perception or history of “loon” is different than mine. Don’t feel bad if a reader’s reaction to your poem is different than you intended. It is important to understand that once a poem leaves the poet, it is open to other interpretations. As a writer it is our job to minimize that difference, but not at the expense of the reader’s own discovery. 

 

Haiku can have meaning. Some people insist that haiku don’t mean anything. That they are just a direct observation of nature as it is. While I agree that a river is just a river and has no extraordinary significance in the objective universe, it can mean something further to me, personally, subjectively, at a certain point in time. Otherwise I am just writing pictures and a camera could do a much better job than I ever could. My first guideline mentioned the importance of letting things speak for themselves, and while this should always be true, it doesn’t mean they will have the last word. It is important to be unafraid of where the poem’s meaning leads you. As beginners we are inundated with rules. Yet a moment of perception has no rules! This past summer I wrote the poem,

 

   mountain pass 

   my brothers stride

   longer than mine. 

As I recited this poem to myself until I could pull pen and paper out of my pocket (much to the annoyance of my brother who rightly thinks such jottings are excuses to catch my breath) I played with the word order, and in one version used “his stride” in the second line. That reminded me of a letter from someone who thought I was a Christian writer and when I thought of the poem in that light it created a whole new poem with a very different meaning. Yet both poems do mean something to me. One is a commentary on how two people can confront the same thing differently; the other my confrontation with the nature of God. 

But both were discovered after the experience spoke for itself.

 

Nature as the subject of poetry. In 2004 Dee Evetts asked the question: why do so many poets who live in urban areas write poems primarily about Nature? A fair question considering the Western tradition’s focus on experiential moments. At the time I responded that nature had a natural cycle that urban life was missing. I’d add now that nature also has an immediacy missing in modern life. For example, I know I get paid twice a month, so I can call in sick once and a while, plus I get Saturday and Sunday off to hike, play some golf, etc. A hawk I see sweeping the field on my Sunday outing doesn’t have that luxury. If he doesn’t find food he starves. He doesn’t have time for hobbies. That immediacy is something both scary and yet vital. And perhaps missing from our lives. I think we write about nature to connect with that missing immediacy.

 

It’s an American (Canadian, British, Indian, etc.) poem. In talking to some haiku poets recently I was surprised to learn that they were not Modern Haiku subscribers—Modern Haiku, the grand dame of haiku journals! —or subscribers of Acorn, Mayfly, etc. Collections of Basho, Buson, et all are fine, but poetry journals and collections by our contemporaries are where we see what writers here and now are writing—people in the same environment with often the same concerns as ourselves. I am not trying to write an ancient Japanese poem, but a modern American one; and I suspect others are doing the same. Write about your discoveries. 

 

 

 

014. On Metaphor

 

It is a commonplace among haiku poets and readers that metaphor is an excessively abstract poetic technique, that it draws attention away from the object of contemplation towards the psyche of the poet, even that it imposes the poet’s perceptions on the reader.  But is this true?  As a poet who writes both haiku and very different kinds of poetry, I have always been dubious about what sometimes manifests as a moral injunction against metaphor – as if the metaphoric habit reveals the poet to be hopelessly egotistical, authoritarian, and solipsistic.  Recently, reading The Tree House, Kathleen Jamie’s collection of nature poems, my doubts took on a more specific cast.

 

Consider the final stanzas of the poem ‘Alder’:

 

The rain showers

release from you a broken tune

 

but when the sun blinks, as it must,

how you’ll sparkle –

 

like a fountain in a wood

of untold fountains.[1]

 

When I read these lines I was immediately struck by a very vivid memory of walking along a path past rain-dripping alders in the New Forest, and then a similar memory of walking down the road in Morgan Bay, Maine.  Despite the overt use of metaphor, simile, and even personification, the poem didn’t oust my own experience and replace it with that of the poet – and in any event, would such a thing be possible?  There is always a necessary gap in any metaphor and simile, a gap in which we sense the difference between the things beings compared even as we perceive the aptness of the comparison.  This gap is not unlike the negative space between the two parts of a haiku, and similarly seemed to invite my own perceptions and memories into the poem.  

I was left with a vivid impression of the alders dripping with rain, and also with a palpable sense of the life in things, and at no point did I feel imposed upon by the poet.  Like the haiku, Jamie’s poem seemed to meet me half way.

 

Nor do the terms of the metaphors and similes impose upon each other.  It is true that the forward movement of syntax encourages us to read the metaphor one way: the alders hung with raindrops look like fountains.  But when reading a metaphor there is always a slippage in which the terms reverse, so that we are simultaneously aware of the alder-like qualities of fountains.  In this way, metaphoric language is all about the connections between things.  The ultimate implication of metaphor is that everything is one with everything else – an insight that I would  have thought would be attractive to the haiku poet.

 

It is probable that metaphor in haiku is best implied rather than overt (although this assumption should not go unchallenged).  It is also possible that a long poem written entirely in implied metaphors would become costive.  That is, there is nothing morally and ethically superior about the implied metaphor, its value for the haiku lies in the way it allows several poems to coincide in the same space, vastly increasing the resonance a few lines can create.  The implied metaphor is an effective technique for the short poem, but a poetic form based on image fragments is no less ‘literary’ than a poem based on overt metaphor.  If anything, reading The Tree House revealed the way in which the concerns of the haiku movement are shared by poets who at first sight seem very different.

 

[1] Kathleen Jamie, The Tree House, (Picador, 2004), p.7.

 

 

 

015, Sunday Painter

 

I find my niche on a hill facing the Boat Lake, where glimpses of blue are visible through a screen of tall saplings with orange and gold leaves, and there I set up my easel. An elderly man makes his way uphill to watch me paint. Almost immediately: “I see in your painting the lake goes up. A lake lies flat,” he says, with gestures, “like this.”

 

I try to explain that I am experimenting with an oriental concept, a vertical format like a hanging scroll. “You don't look like a Chinaman. Why do you want to paint like one? You are an attractive young lady.” As he expounds his views on art, life and love, I can't concentrate on painting. I am losing my inspiration. Time passes. The sunlight fades, the lake loses its blue, the leaves their gold. Tomorrow I will be back in the office, typing invoices for the household cleanser that “hasn't scratched yet.”

 

cold autumn rain

someone has borrowed

my good umbrella

 

The next May. A young man is lying on the grass reading a book. He keeps looking up to watch me paint the cherry trees. His eyes are gray-green. (I don't know it at the time, but one of them is glass.) He whistles, accurately but with feeling, the slow movement of the Beethoven violin concerto. He waits until I finish and am packing up my paints and palette. Then he comes over and introduces himself....

 

leaving my colors home

I go to meet him

under falling cherry petals

 

 

 

016. Cherry

 

"Where are you going in that new shirt?"

 

"None of your business

 

The couple next door is fighting. The baby's crying. My roommates and I know what their place is like-tenement apartment, bare light bulb, bathtub in kitchen, toilet in hall. Like ours. But we're summer students in New York. No smell of diapers here.

 

carrying it with me

the ambience of the studio

linseed and turps

 

The fight continues. "You're going to meet her, aren't you."

 

"Look who's talking. You wasn't cherry when I married you."

 

"YOU TOOK MY CHERRY!"

 

My roommates and I listen and learn. Another New York word. Cherry!

 

two years

of drawing from the nude

and still cherry

 

A discreet tapping at our fire escape window. The young husband. "Ladies, can I get out through your apartment? She's blocking the door."

 

We shrug. "O.K."

 

I forget what color the shirt was.

 

in the cool of morning

thumping the newly stretched canvas

tight as a drum

 

 

 

017. Haiku in Italy

 

Italy has a long tradition of poetry writing that employs a wide range of topics and uses various metrical forms. Haiku is not an easy genre for those who try to write in this style, as acquiring the necessary skills usually takes a considerable amount of time. Italian poets certainly haven't got used to the simplicity and the brevity of haiku, however they seem to like the challenge. This accounts for the flourishing of haiku groups in our country. Their participants are committed not only to composing, but also to discussing haiku poems. Another thing, they try to popularise this trend of poetry in our country, and seem to be quite successful here, as many of the members of the afore-mentioned groups have their poems awarded in the competitions that periodically run inside the country. Not many of the poets actually adhere to the Japanese rules of writing 5-7-5 haiku, or, wider, haiku that have seventeen syllables. This isn't a bad thing, however even less of our haijin use kigo and rhythmical equivalents of kireji composing their poems. Instead of using a proper kigo, some of them with dull regularity use the name of a season, and sometimes would even make words like "Autumn" or "Spring" the titles of their haiku forgetting that there shouldn't be any. This is an unevitable blemish that follows the widespread haiku expansion in our country but I don't see any huge problem here, as with the passing of time more of our poets will learn to write sublime haiku.

Talking about haiku associations in our country, I must mention the national haiku association founded in 1987 in Rome by Sono Uchida, the well-known Japanese haijin and the ambassador of Japan in Vatican. Also involved in the establishing of the first Italian haiku associaton were Michiko Nojiri, the European representative of the Urasenke House that organises Japanese tea ceremonies all around the world, and Marisa di Iorio of the Empiria Publishing House. I joined them on return from a prolonged stay in Japan. Subsequently the national association called Italian Friends of the haiku (Associazione Italiana Amici dell'Haiku) was founded. The further development of it was facilitated by the interest from Araki Tadao, the Ambassador of Japan  and a fine poet. The association publishes an information bulletin titled Yasude; it is edited by Michiko Nojiri and myself. The activity of the Empiria Publishing House () has lately increased, which resulted in the publication of translations of some works by ancient and modern Japanese poets, as well as by the leading Italian authors of haiku.

In the end of June 2009 the annual prize-giving ceremony will take place in Rome: the Institute of Japanese Culture (Istituto di cultura giapponese di Roma) will award the best haiku written in the Italian language according to the Japanese metrics (Premio letterario nazionale de haiku). This prize was first introduced twenty-three years ago, and is still being awarded. A special prize is always given to the best haiku written by students of Italian primary and secondary schools. This is one of the successful initiatives of the Association of Italian Friends of Haiku, and I must mention that over the course of the last two decades we had many interesting discoveries in this category, and some exciting new poets have joined the ranks of our haijin.

 

 

 

018. Wisteria Journal


dee, a tall man, has learned to bow early and often here in Japan     this is no mere politeness or deference to custom—beams and doorframes are precisely the wrong height for him, high enough not to be noticed, low enough not to be missed     it is impressive to see his negotiation of these obstacles, which our hosts always mistake for courtesy     as a consequence he is a great favorite everywhere we go

the morning after plunging down through the blackness to Tsurunoyu Onsen, we discover the true character of this enveloping mountain     with the warming spring sun upon its snowy aspect, it fairly glows benevolence     we bathe expansively, with a luxurious feeling of time on our hands, although in reality we must be ready for the eleven o’clock bus to take us back to the station     still there is time to hike the deep snow trails behind the onsen     a few hundred yards up one I discover a shrine perfect in appearance but with the wood crumbling to the touch; a second leads up the mountain, where I sink through the thin crust of the snow to my hip over and over, but always just one leg at a time, and always managing to extricate myself

 

after breakfast, some journal jottings and an amiable conversation with a man from Kyoto who had studied at Stanford, we make our way to the front desk to pay the bill     opposite the counter there is a rudimentary gift shop, with handicrafts of the area     these include some home-made wooden objects whose possible uses escape us; books, calendars, post cards; the occasional plastic trinket     nothing seems indispensible     and yet we would like something to remind of us of this trek to the far north, long after the warm glow of the baths is worn off

checking out, we exchange some pleasantries with our hostess     sudddenly her smile freezes upon her lips, and a sharp crack sounds behind me     i turn to find dee’s face contorted, and a trickle of blood rising up on his uncovered scalp     a rough-cut sharp-cornered beam, smoke-blackened to blend with the ceiling shadows, bears a single dulled edge

 

silently he masters himself, then gives the first of many bows with which he punctuates this trip, and slips under the beam into the outdoors where he stretches himself to full extension beneath a high sky

     the good old days a veteran fingers his scar

 

 

 

019. The Cattle Yard in Brosna 

 

lane's end

a hare bolts the evening

meadow

 

It's July 1961 and I'm three years old. The sky is winterish, black staining downwards through the clouds. I'm standing in the front yard; from the shed behind me, locked in the dark, a red setter is barking viciously; but he's background noise now and I know I'm safe. When Uncle Jack took me into the shed to see him earlier, a wild massive dog called Punch, I was scared senseless, gripped to the leg of Jack's trousers and screeched my lungs out. But in the yard this moment everything is calm, held down by that darkening sky.

 

The iron gate into the cattle yard, right behind my back, hangs crookedly on its hinges. A hen and a single chick peck at the ground. The previous evening I had chased her and her line of chicks all around the midden. Had terrorized them in my excitement, cornering them against the slope of the dung-pile; finally held a chick in my grasp, down on my knees, all my clothes smeared green with cow shit.

 

I only recall this now because the camera preserved me that day standing there in the yard. In front of where I stand, unremembered by the photograph, unseen, is the dank conifer wood, its trees covered in moss. Inside its damp boundaries birdsong is a snatch of sound, is swallowed up by silence as soon as it comes. The wood is a barrier like the grey sky, holding everything down.

 

In the photograph I have a pale streak of shadow. I am sucking my thumb. I am alone; yet unborn are my four brothers, one of whom will never, will never step into that wood.

 

I put the photograph away. Now in the closed drawer, standing forever in the yard, my young self is ageless again in the dark.

 

memoriam card

still smiling

twenty-four years dead

 

In the bathroom I cut my fingernails. The parings of nail fall into the sink, each paring a record of some past time.

 

 

 

020. Pale Sunlight
 

I head for the hospital; trees are bare, the streets gritty. My neighbor is in the psych ward. She recognizes me, but can't remember what happened. I don't tell her she overdosed on prescription meds. Or that her doctor is worried about permanent brain damage.

She babbles about going outside. "The sunshine will make me better." Since she's not allowed to visit the courtyard alone, I agree to walk with her. 

snowdrops—
the simplicity
of white

 

 

 

021. Finch

 

We expected the storm, it arrived to bully things that flap, and twist, and tumble in the wind; we found morning fields and hedges in new snow and the blue sky which only cold can make.

 

winter wind

a crystal cyclone

night-snow

 

A girl from two streets over came and shoveled the path.  I don't really know what caused her to do this kindness without hire.  I know her by name:  Nicole, is it the cold on your face that helps you move my snowdrifts?  If that is true, then I am thankful for cold and snowdrifts, both.

 

Near the house, where the twisting of snow can't go, or won't go; where bare earth separates snowdrift from basement wall, I see a finch that won't fly.  We look too long at each other.  Did she come here to find me; and speak with black eyes?  I saw her speak to me.  I only think of this now in afternoon when I return to that place by the basement wall, it is there that I find my failure.

 

brown-grey finch

folded shuttlecock

volley unreturned

 

 

 

022. Not a Black-or-White Matter

 

                                    Key West pier –

                                    someone has left

                                    a pair of mismatched shoes

 

Standing at Teddy’s window, the bay shimmers as if layered

with crystal blue sequins. Teddy had six months to live – 18

years ago.  Yesterday, a new hospice nurse asked him "Why

are you wearing different color shoes?" (One was orange. the

other green.)  "So I know which foot to put them on," quips Ted, a faux frown crossing his face, but not hiding his smile.

 

Today, Ted has on one red shoe and one yellow shoe. Another

nurse can not resist the clichéd question.  "So I know which foot to put them on," says Ted with a twinkle that belies his pained look.

 

In a week, though, there are no more questions about the shoes, no noticing of Ted’s long time iconic trademark.  We all wish life were different, but “Theodore’s Wake”  is followed by “Ted's SALE.”  And Teddy’s prized possessions are sold – in matching pairs.

 

 

 

023. The First Snow

 

    “Tomorrow it is going to snow,” my father said.

    “How do you know?” I asked.

Father and I walk hand in hand through the stubble of the hay fields to the top of the hill beside the house.  The night air is crisp and fresh, a welcome reprieve from the warm air of the house.  I savour the sound of my boots crunching ice that had formed over the puddles carved deep from wagon wheels hauling crates of apples from the orchard to the barn. 

    “There,” my father said, drawing a large circle with his arm around the pasty gray light of the full moon.  “See the ring around the Moon?”

    “Yes,” I whispered.  It was beautiful.  An iridescent ring of ice crystals hung like a halo over the hill on which we stood.

 

In the distance an owl hooted and filled the night air with a closeness that binds a father and a son, the Moon and its ring, the stillness and the cold, the forest and the sleeping animals.  I felt a shiver run through my bones.  I held my breath hoping somehow to make this moment last forever, to be carved deep into my memory, like a beautiful dream, never to be forgotten.

 

Silence fills the air

Deer in the orchard lay still

Calm before the storm

 

 

 

024. Write Like a Lover!

 

My little brother helped me hit America, but I helped him quit Poland first. That time, there was no way to leave without becoming a Communist, or I didn’t know how. Desperate to leave, I wrote scholars, called philosophers, and fired letters in any language I could crack, seducing pen pals.

 

                              fast mail

                              my hand

                              her pocket

 

I had always been a k’nacker, Yiddish for “show-off,” at knocking off a killer missive. Lovers begged me to sing their love. “Make her fall for me,” they would whine. "Break her heart as she had mine." So, I did. “If I get you, I get a future,” I would woo, for instance. “If I don’t, I don't even get a past.” I fooled folks to fall for each other, and then, I watched them walk about wounded, weak, lovesick. It felt good. I loved to write like a lover. And just like Srulik, the Sholom Aleichem’s hero, I brought lots of lovers together while getting more and more lonely myself.

 

                            shoemakers

                            go shoeless

                            lovers loveless

 

One day I got a letter from Israel, Mama called. She shipped it in a rogaleh package. Mama baked great rogaleh — crunchy, cheesy, sugar-dusted with poppy-seeds. I was dying to sink my teeth in the baked goods, but even more in the letter. But it wasn’t to be — a thief got a whiff, cut a hole, ate the stuff, and stole the letter. All I got was a box full of smell. The girl's name was Dorota Jakubowicz, Mama recalled. I traveled to Israel trice, never finding her.

 

                            rushing creek

                            log stuck

                            spinning

 

About the same time, a perfumed letter came from a 16-year-old girl, Missy, living in Sacramento. I had dreamed of seducing an American girl, but here, one was seducing me. Pure angel, godsend. I couldn't believe my luck. But I couldn't get her, either -- she was too green, too baby. So, instead, I knocked off a killer letter and signed my brother's name.

 

Mario and Missy hit it off right from the go. Soon, Missy, now legal, flew in to visit. Then, she again flew in – this time, to marry Mario and fly together. Payback time had arrived. Once in America, Missy fired off a missive to the Polish cops to set me free.

 

                               my hand

                               flowering, an old

                               love letter

 

 

025. Feast of Tabernacles

 

The sukkah on the back deck is pretty flimsy -- the frame barely holds the“roof”of fronds hung with pumpkins, cobs, and garlic. It imitates the shacks of ancient Israelites, then desert rats. The wanderers have arrived, snug downtown now, but the sukkah keeps the memory afresh.

 

I sniff the etrog and shake the lulav in the make-believe shack, saying a brocha, or a blessing. Have I arrived? No. Not in my dreams. In my dreams, I'm still circling the Promised Land, afraid to enter, thinking everybody inside a giant, and thinking myself a grasshopper, outside.

 

I wake up dreaming about shoes. It's a recurring nightmare. In shock I stare at a mountain of old, dusty, disfigured, worn-out, soiled shoes. I saw it in Auschwitz  and I never forgot. I lay quiet, unable to fall back asleep, and I realize the shoes are my own. I'd worn a mountain of shoes schlepping around the desert, taking wrong turns, and living in a sukkah with the backyard view.

 

                          beachcombing

                          every sea onion

                          a question mark

 

 

 

026. Diary of Yesterday

 

In the early morning, I customarily rise, when the moon falls, when the mist gathers around the tree’s congregation, almost an exhalation of the earth’s spirit.  Blinking at the circumstance, temporarily confused at my location and meaning, I hear your breathing and it focuses me.  Now the winter’s worst here, a temperate land, over which clouds gather and break, storms one day, the first tentative gathering of songbirds the next.  Last night snow, and you shivered when you came home.  I offered you fresh baked bread, the steam, like the mist, leaving the broken crust.

 

When the first buds show

on the oak branches, I smell

blood in your hair.  

 

 

 

027. Red Tailed Hawk, March 10, 2009

 

On the way to work I noticed a large bird by the side of Rt 66.   On a sudden impulse I pulled over.   It was a large red tailed hawk decked in a gorgeous mane of white and brown feathers.  One inch claws clenched, his yellow eyes closed, his body crumpled ….face down in the asphalt.   Eighteen wheelers roared by, their backwash ruffling his feathers.  Wearing work gloves I placed the hawk on the car floor, as I leave a young female red tailed hawk, glided by low, as if saying goodbye to her mate.  Two more young hawks watched from the trees.

For the rest of the day I drove around with his body.  The only scent was the smell of fall leaves. 

 

Perhaps it was my imagination but I felt I heard the ever so faint whisper of my Native ancestors as I drove.   Arriving home I gently placed his body in the shed, to keep the wandering dogs away.

 

Sunday night, when it was dark I lit a bundle of desert sage and approached the hole I had earlier dug.   I laid him in that shallow grave, chanting a sacred mantra….. as the nearly full moon rose directly overhead in the clear starlit sky.   As faint wisps of sage smoke lingered, I played the wooden flute softly, then with my bare hands buried this beautiful creature.

 

Although I would have liked one of his tail feathers, I refrained, not wanting to desecrate his body.

 

My ancestors agreed…..

 

Cool, crisp moonlit sky

A hand dappled with age spots

The smell of fresh earth

 

 

 

028. The Way Back

 

As I drift in the lush grass, a monarch butterfly alights by my side. Suppose, as my aunt had told me, the dark map of lines on orange wings really is the way back to my childhood?

 

swingset -

I try to flip

over the sky

 

 

 

029. Spectator Sport

 

Top of the seventh, 14 to 2. Evening sunlight slants below an arch of cloud, turning the field to emerald and copper. A hit drops behind second – the runner stumbles as he glances at a fan dancing on the dugout, a diamond flashing from her smooth midriff.

 

The Vipers’ mascot, a snake who looks like he’s swallowed a beachball, jives in the aisle, his paunch swaying to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” I wash down the last bite of hot dog with beer, the salt-malt combo taking me back to games savoured with long-ago lovers of baseball, and of me. Today we sit through the old chorus, a quartet of women watching our bodies change.

 

seventh-inning stretch …

faded bleachers

once red

 

 

 

030. Tragedy

Remember you are alone in your own kitchen. The sounds of your wife's snores can barely be heard over Peter Jennings. The radio translates the BBC World News, and Michael Feldman teaches you "Things You Should Have Learned In School (Had You Been Paying Attention)." The curve of your knife makes a soft sound as it rocks through the pepper. After your dinner, you turn off the radio, creep through the living room to turn off the television, and linger to cover your wife with a blanket and watch her sleep. Later that night, she will wake you as she falls into bed. Her feet are cold against your back. Beneath your pillow, the wedding ring is loose on your finger.

 

worn rosary

in the closet, a suitcase

remains untouched

 

 

 

031. “Blowin’ in the wind,”

 

his unmistakable voice drawls from “Free Wheeling Bob Dylan” 1963 reissued.  Forty-three years ago I played this song in my narrow dorm room, and heard him live at the Austin City Auditorium.

 

On the cover he looks so young: curly hair, hands stuffed in pockets of his jeans, his sweetheart’s head on his shoulder as they walk down a Greenwich Village street.  Was life ever that carefree for Bob, or for me?

 

ebb tide

the long reflection

of the setting sun

 

 

 

032. It Was More Than Twenty Years Ago Today

 

After dinner my wife and I buy some coffee ice cream cones and stroll along the river.  I tell her about my idea to add a slide ukulele riff to a song we’ve been working on. A musical wink to George Harrison, I explain. She’s quiet for a moment, concentrating on the last of her cone, and stares out at the river. “Ringo,” she says, “must be at least seventy.”

 

a barge

hauling coal upstream

the moon in its wake

 

 

 

033. How I Learned the Word Palliative 

            - for Joan Starr, 2005

 

J’s emails grow fewer through the spring.  In early summer, we receive: “Saw the doc; cancer is in my lungs, possibly in the bladder again, and still in my pelvis.  We are going to do nothing at this time; once symptoms appear, any chemo will be palliative.  My personal horizon is in months, with no one being able to predict when things will wind down.  Will have seen all my family by the first week in June, so this is good.  Have worked out most of the details with C (bless this child) and the other two are in concurrence; again, thank heavens these children all are in accord. P having a fairly tough time; … this can't be a good time for him.  He will go into assisted living once I can no longer look after him.  Am sorry to be so self-absorbed right now, but am trying to notify my important people. Will talk later.  Much Love, J.”

 

a hard Autumn wind –

shadows of tree limbs

move through mine

 

We do not talk.  Late August, J dies.  Befitting her love of others, J does not "rage against the dying of the light."*  She leaves in peace to go with gentle grace “into that good night.”*  J lives her belief: All is gained through gentleness. 

 

cobwebs -

the gate still

unopened

 

We are sad, hurt, angry at her leaving.  As we move on, we discover that we try “to cloak, conceal” our pain, “to cover by excuses and apologies” medicine’s failure, “to moderate the intensity” of our frustration.  We learn that we have become palliative.

 

home for rent

its front porch

shrouded with ice

 

*Dylan Thomas

 

 

 

034. Legion

 

The landlord met me at the door to the bungalow, and it was sticky and still, a black cloud overhead. The landlord met me at the door where he exchanged a key for the agreed-upon cash. He was a fat man, a fidgety man, and sweating profusely, he dabbed now at his brow, now at the back of his neck with a white handkerchief.

 

His property sat on an out-of-the-way and rickety cul-de-sac. Other than the queer, sickly, yellow wooden shingles, that tract house could have stood-in for the white shack next door, for the brown one beyond or for the next white one beyond that.

 

on the shady side

of the white clapboard,

a rest for the eyes

 

It’s real quiet hereabouts, the landlord kept saying, and ain’t nobody asking nobody no questions, he mumbled while chewing one end of a big cheap cigar.

 

I watched him pocket the last of my cash, then closed the door behind him. I glanced about. The floors were swept clean and the place was bare. I didn’t recoil from the quiet or the blank vacancy surrounding me. I hadn’t come with furniture or with luggage but with a plain gunny sack and with my by-then familiar voices, the brittle voices of my dead, and they were legion.

 

I was only holing up for a short while anyway, holing up long enough to catch my breath, and then I would be traveling on.

 

a pregnant spider

waxing great at the threshold—

a flash of lightning

 

 

 

035. Sacred Energies

 

It's centre towered from a green expanse beyond the town, a local landmark, site of a December solstice star.Most of the masonry fallen down by force after a long dereliction.

Spaces through which mats of light once spread out at intervals along the floor of the semi-circular extended corridor, at first blocked off, now just a memory; symmetry slowly sacrified for a bleak beauty in the crumbling shell where hordes of those deemed unstable sought a cure. In its own plot apart, now overgrown, the roof graced by a row of pigeons, only the place of formal worship, built to accomodate a thousand, kept totally intact.

 

'What's madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance.'

 

asylum chapel-

yellow spires of mullein

upright in the sun

 

 

 

036. Siri

 

I want to tell you how I twirl my fingers on this black box and then

how the sound it makes comes up—how it joins the world. But I don't.

And I don't play for you. You're sleeping in the other room. It's just

me and the sound of this spring rain.

 

on tip-toes

trying

not to wake you

 

 

 

037. On the Road to Nowhere

 

In the year 2007, my 51st in this world, I went to work for the Golden Gate Corporation, an American Internet company, which provides the roundabouts and traffic lights on the information superhighway. I was curious to experience life in a large organisation where the matrix had replaced traditional hierarchies of ‘command and control’; making it all possible was the Internet; transcending time-zones and old frontiers.

 

Opening the window

The browser Googles

A flickering image

 

The European headquarters was a large, glass box in a grey frame that nestled on a grassy bank beside a lake with swans and other water fowl; to the common man it appeared like a shining palace removed from everyday life by a moat.

 

Beneath the surface

Steady in the currant

Three large pike

 

For the first few weeks I travelled in each day, taking the train to Clapham Junction where for a brief moment I joined the river of humanity on its way to work. I flowed down through the underground walkway and up to Platform 5 and the fast train out to Feltham. Waiting at the other end, a white courtesy bus whisked the black laptops off to work.

 

Life slides by

The morning traffic reflects

On a Blackberry

 

Meeting me on my first day, the American manager pointed me towards the Virtual Private Network with the reassurance, “Don’t worry if it doesn’t make any sense. At first it’s like trying to drink from a fire hose!’ And for several weeks I did indeed wander lonely as a cloud through the virtual workshop, adrift from colleagues and the tools of my trade.

 

Silent summer’s day

A scatter of tip taps

On the laptop

 

I worked with people who were somewhere else so I hardly got to know those that shared the ‘drop in’ area. In fact, I liked the anonymity and once I had set up ‘Odyssey’ on my laptop, I was free to work remotely, where and when I wanted. So while most people were rushing to work, I could finish off my email in the home office and then head off to the Lido for a swim.

 

Empty in-box

The soft shiny surface

Of an empty pool

 

My job was to provide ‘messaging’ for the project teams that fine-tuned the sales systems and processes … ‘giving time back to sales’ was the oft repeated mantra. And the process was tortured with every step micro-managed like an American football game. The result was an endless progression of meetings and catch up calls!

 

Hi … Hi …

Can you talk? QQ!

A moment in time

 

These meetings were held online using a teleconference service which allowed participants to share PowerPoint presentations and send messages to other participants. The whole process was overseen by an automated announcer who counted us in and counted us out: ‘this meeting is scheduled to end in 10 minutes’, the disembodied voice announced.

 

Electronic impulses

Flashing across Windows

The squabbling swans

 

When all was done, participants would ‘drop off’ to make their next meeting: Minds moved but the bodies remained hunched over the laptops, ears pinking from the pressure of the headphones.

 

Cyber whispers

The swans beyond the window

Splash down silently

 

By way of compensation, the life of the technocracy can be a veritable cornucopia of good living. Arriving in the office I would help myself to a banana, a pear and perhaps a plum from the bowl of free fruit. And from 12.30 the large dining area, with glass doors on to a roof terrace overlooking the lake, served a range of hot and cold cuisines to suit the most discerning palate.

 

Sumptuous summer’s day

Beyond the apple crumble

Cream yellow custard

 

Back at work, the corporate cappuccino machine whirred and foamed a limitless supply of sharp tasting caffeine and the fridges offered up free fruit juices, bottled water and cold cans of Root Beer, Coke, and Fanta. And if that wasn’t enough, there were always the boiled sweets in reception!

 

Hot summer’s day

The hum of the electric fan

Cooling the laptop

 

‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven’ goes the song. And soon we could see the weather turning; storm clouds on the horizon. In our glass palace we knew that the age of abundance was coming to an end. It was the little things that turned virtual reality into physical proof. First off the boiled sweets disappeared from reception; then the cappuccino button on the coffee machine died and finally the ‘Five Alive’ fruit bowls emptied and were filled no more.

 

Inbox of messages

A swan chases a rival

Around the lake

 

There were corporate proclamations and the imposition of travel bans and staff cutbacks. First to feel the knife were the contract staff, or ‘red badges’ as they were called; the goal was a 50% saving each month for the quarter. I was a ‘red badge’ and despite the best efforts of my colleagues, some weeks later I was back in the office to handing in my laptop. For two years I had lived inside it, mind everywhere, travelling nowhere! But now it was back to the real world.

 

Dusk at the end

Letting fresh air into the office

Before closing the door

 

 

 

038. Roll-ups

A man who smokes ‘roll-ups’ is different from the partaker of ‘tailor-mades’; less likely to wear crisp white shirts, more prone to contemplation than action. He’s an ‘eker’ of resources, someone who takes a country lane over a bright new motorway; the smoke thinner, redolent of campfires rather than gas fires. This type of man will never be a high achiever in the ways of the world for he wastes too much time in idle contemplation.

Through closed eyes

The warm red glow of sunlight

On a summer morn

 

 

 

039. Cleaving

 

 

In the spring of 1993, I was nearing the end of my second pregnancy with a daughter. As she once again dug her heels into my ribs, I was able to clutch her tiny heel through my stretched flesh for a few seconds. It was a precious near-meeting in the bright world outside my womb where I knew and held all of her.

 

My thoughts turned to my son, the firstborn, whose tiny heel had been pricked countless times and whose burial booties had been far too big. Could he be as nearby as she with only a translucent spiritual membrane or mime's wall separating his dimension and mine?

 

the rising mist--

all that divides us

all that binds us

 

 

 

040. Goodbye

 

Asleep with my arm under my pillow and stretched so that my hand hangs loose off the bed, palm upward,  I dream that someone’s hand enters mine a moment.  It’s soft, warm, smooth, small.  My mother’s hand.  As I close my hand to squeeze, her hand slips out and off my fingertips, as if in goodbye.   I dream I’m waking up.  The hand is not my mother’s but my wife’s -- an affectionate touch before she leaves for work.  But then I wake up for real:   she’s been gone for hours.

 

autumn morning

patches of light and shadow

on a stone floor

 

 

 

041. Cobalt Canyon: A 36-link Colorenga 

 

 

Jet Blue sparks from the landing gear     LMP

 

adding cornflowers to her wedding bouquet     EC

 

the molten sky about to burst     RB

 

clouds moving across the back yard pool     RPM

 

the bruise on her thigh pimpled in the chill     LDM

 

denim jacket slumped on the folding chair     LP

 

azure as Delores Demure     CC

 

taking the sapphires out of the dinner ring     DWR

 

sunset in cobalt canyon—the sky turns green     JS

 

wine dark sea the oars of the trireme     LMP

 

he substitutes lime for the margarita     EC

 

split pea soup the third day in a row     RB

 

indigestion shows on her face     RPM

 

Pepto-Bismol printed on the chalkboard     LDM

 

ECNALUBMA the red light changes     CC

 

the chameleon stares at the accident scene             DWR

 

desert camouflage another unit called up             LMP

 

a tie dyed shirt bleeds in the wash             RB

 

the new flag on the lesbian couple’s porch             RPM

 

the sandpaper worn out             LDM

 

Dylan record at the bridge game one more cup of coffee CC

 

swapping hunting stories slug of bourbon             DWR

 

banana split a scoop of peppermint             LMP

 

the stoplight stuck on yellow all night long             RB

 

in his eyes the jaundice             RPM

 

a wedge of lemon left on the saucer             LDM

 

renga writer lost in the corn maze             CC

 

month without rain the rose leaves wither and fall            DWR

 

sweet violets a faded potpourri             LMP

 

jeans missing check the daughter’s rear end             RB

 

the singer howls his lover gone             RPM

 

through the window the lake swells             LDM

 

bottom of the toilet bowl turquoise necklace             CC

 

earthquake the Ming vase in shards             LMP

 

second marriage his eyes too the color of slate             RB

 

her indigo bra caps the bedpost at dusk             LDM

 

 

 

042.  TRAFFIC STOPS

  

     the long dinner

     punctuated by children

     with raspberries

 

 

 

043. outside the box

    by Roberta Beary, D.C.

 

single, married, divorced, widowed.  that’s what the little boxes on government forms say. but some of us can’t marry, at least not lawfully, because of where we call home.  what box do we check?

 

              photo magnet

            the couple’s face

            just a blur

 

 

 

044. To Contest or Not to Contest

 

I’m feeling inadequate this morning, a little down. The birds are singing but no haiku springs to mind. I suppose I could write a tanka instead of this message to you, but it’s too late. The pull of verbosity has won and I’m going with the flow, even if it’s down the drain.

 

I’ve spent the last week reading all the haiku and tanka journals and publications that piled up over the summer in my absence, as well as online publications that I can’t manage to get to when I’m traveling. I have to say, we short-form poets are an accomplished lot. If the brief bios are any indication, most of us have won more prizes and contests than Idi Amin had medals. Not all of us. I haven’t.

 

Before you turn the page, let me assure you this is not a self-pity piece. I have no illusions as to my abilities as a poet. One reason I haven’t won many prizes or contests is that most of what I write is merely okay. It shows an understanding of the craft but the need for practice. (And many of the pieces I send out thinking are near masterpieces look pretty meager in print surrounded by much better work.)

 

I also haven’t won a lot of contests because I rarely participate. There are several reasons for this, a lack of contests not being one of them. First of all, there is the impracticality of the process for me. When I began seriously attempting to publish my short-form poetry a couple of years ago, I at last had a reason to love the internet. I was living abroad, in Bahrain, and going to the post office and dealing with IRCs and weighing this then that and licking envelope flaps and stamps and thinking of that scene in Seinfeld in which George’s fiancée dies from  seal-            ing wedding invitations got to be too much. When I moved  to Thailand, I vowed only to submit to journals that accepted online submissions. I’ve been faithful to that vow, which is why, well, at least partially why, none of my work has appeared in a couple of reputable publications or crossed the desk of a contest judge in a postmarked envelope with the stamps peeling off at the corners.

 

Then there’s the question of money. I don’t begrudge anyone a reading fee, it’s just that sending money, cash (stupid, I know) or check, from China, where I live now, is a bit like playing a slot machine. One is always warned that he sends cash at his own risk. In China, it is a guaranteed loss, or a donation to a needy postal worker if you try to look on the bright side. I can’t find my checkbook most of the time, and 25% of the time the check I send never arrives. Most expatriate Brits and Aussies I know don’t even have checkbooks, unless they are of a certain age. They’ve gone electronic, plastic. Which deepens the mystery of why Australian and British publications view PayPal with suspicion and fear. If I can use it, anyone can.

 

 And another thing . . .What’s with the 3x5 note cards? I haven’t seen a note card since I went through my late grandmother’s recipe collection. I exaggerate, but only slightly. Just because you have a horse doesn’t mean you have to ride it to school.

 

 Having said all that, I’ll confess to having entered a few contests, all of which accepted online submissions and required no reading or entry fee. In one, my haiku was commended. Yes, it felt good, but then all those other contests beckoned, and the next thing I knew I wasn’t writing poetry, I was manufacturing themed pieces about frogs or trees or erotic moments (or if I was really inspired I might capture that moment in nature when frogs get it on in the trees). The feeling I now have toward contests is similar to my love-hate relationship to taking photographs. If you give yourself over to finding that perfect shot, you miss all the wonderful imperfection around you.

 

 

 

045. duplicate

 

 

046. GATHERS THE VOLUME UP

You speak German? She asks while biting her lower lip in faux perplexity while staring at the well-worn splayed cover of Traktat über kritische Vernunft, by Hans Albert. He quickly gathers the volume up and inserts an old St. Louis MetroBus transfer stub to hold his place. She giggles a bit as he deftly unhooks her vintage charcoal pencil skirt, releasing her from her afternoon appointment, while steering her hips to the nearby rolled-arm silk-upholstery white settee.

penthouse view

sound of seagulls

everywhere

 

047. SHIRAZ

I haven’t had a drink in five years, well, not more than a glass here and there, not since my brother died of a cocaine overdose, but I have to say, to say that this bottle, this Shiraz, this is no doubt, doubtlessly the best bottle of wine or whatever I’ve had in a long time.

two weeks of rain

the faces in the mold

on the café wall

 

----

 

 

 

048. TODAY LAROUSSE

I assess the shadows beneath her eyes, evident since the first day of this semester. The sandy blonde pelt of her head is as matted as the tricot she wears. The ever-fading pattern, paler than pale, is threadbare on the elbows. The grey of her school shirt etches those elbows, already stripped of baby fat. A smear of food encrusts the right cuff. Pumpkin, turnip, maybe pickle from a birthday Big Mac? She hands me a note, ostensibly written by a father I’ve never met. A slipped stitch shows on her waistband. I edge between the rows of desks, pocketing the latest excuse. The words are sketchy, the ink smudged. Her singed eyebrows whisper of things I’d rather not know. I gather up the class sets, today Larousse.

 

wintry day

the smell of rain

on a pink sweater

 

 

 

049. FULTON STREET

 

I didn’t know anything; I thought if I cooked a hot meal every night, kept our two-room apartment clean and enlivened it with decorative touches—Japanese prints, Indian throw pillows here and there—that he would care for me as in the early days, or at least stay a little bit longer.

.

wisps of fog—

breaking up

the joint account

 

 

 

050. CAPE MAY

 

The fuschia and lavender facades of the Victorian B & Bs stare out across Beach Avenue, porches salt grizzled and blown with snow. From my window, nothing but cloud-packed sky and empty avenues. Even the seagulls hang in the sky as if painted. The whole town holds itself, like Hokusai’s wave, in frozen anticipation.

 

 

My pen

on the table

full of ink

 

 

 

051.PLATO’S CAVE

I meet by chance on the street someone who resembles one of my dead grandpas and who could be the twin brother of Carl Sandburg, who died even longer ago. We walk into his basement apartment, the entrance a trap door. It's either that or a farmhouse cellar—hard to tell in the dream. He tells me his problem—what to do with his many manuscripts, books, papers. I suggest hiring an assistant, someone who won't know or care that he's working for a well-known writer. We talk about Huckleberry Finn, why it's reread, despite its moral dilemmas, to re-create lost innocence.

 

As I glance at his close-cropped hair, crow's feet, tired but still-bright eyes, the scene shifts to midwinter in Ohio, snow a foot deep, and me standing in the kitchen of my parents' house, my last boyhood home in their small town. Beyond the dinette curtains, five horses, their nostrils steaming, wait on the moonlit driveway, which is cleared of snow. I cry out for dad to see. When I wake, a headache I've had for days is gone.

 

standing still

the longest time

roller coaster

.

 

 

052. LAND’S END

 

The county road peters out in the parking lot of a lobster pound but the land keeps going, jutting into the bay. To get to the summer cottages visitors travel a double-rutted dirt road that narrows to a single mud-packed path around boulders on the final approach to the mud flats. Beyond a sandy spit granite ledges hold the last accumulation of soil. It’s enough to support the salt-sprayed and wind-pruned sumac and bayberry bushes to the height of a grade school child, not even the tallest in her class.

 

 

saving bits of shell

from the beach where we scattered

her ashes

the tint of red in the shale

bleeding iron

 

 

 

053. EN POINTE

 

Someone’s daughter loves to dance. Any unheard music seems to do, and any partner. The table’s shimmed leg attends her lifted heel. She gains a peek beyond the windowsill.

 

ballet slippers

pigeon-toed

beside the bed

 

 

 

054. WIND POWER

On the Beaufort Scale of 2, a light breeze forms wavelets, rustles palms. On the scale of 4, a moderate breeze wipes footprints from the sand, blows a sailboat out to sea. And on 8, a gale of 40 knots, I paddle my surfboard out in the ocean; make it to the lineup, sit-up, and wait for the sets. A swell approaches. Turning the nose of my board shoreward, I start to paddle then stand. I ride towards those palm branches snapping, and breakers crashing against rock; my mother’s voice gone.

 

a deep-sea

anglerfish slams

its mouth shut—

for a limpet,

an unknown universe.

 

 

 

055. for Sakaki Nanao

 

out hiking after Nanao Sakaki has died — woods all ice — it's xmas — all this way that light in my spine mind my footing — at the very end there's a pen on the trail — once mine — lost months ago — Nanao what are you up to now — not showing up in this cold to grin — ok — congratulations!

 

                        icy woods

                                        for xmas

                                                       nanao!

 

 

Sakaki was the Japanese beat friend of Snyder and Ginsberg. He was a world traveler— most of it by foot. He translated forty-some of Issa's poems in a little book.

 

 

 

 

 056. Lavenham

 

My father finally came to visit me one summer. He wanted to see how his hippie son was doing, and he wanted to show me Newmarket, the town where he was raised. He had rented a car, and after visiting me in Twickenham and Richmond for a day or so, we drove into Suffolk, a county to the northeast of London. Like much of England, it was like driving back through time. Little villages on narrow, hedge-lined roads winding through neat fields. On the outskirts of one village we even had to drive the little Escort across a cattle crossing – the road dipped into a pebble-lined stream bed, and we had to slowly cross through a few inches of lazily moving trout stream.

 

England

sheep grazing

among gravestones

 

We toured Newmarket, a picturesque village which has long been the headquarters of Britain’s thoroughbred horse racing and breeding. For a treat he decided to show me the ancestral home of the Faiers, an even more quaint and tiny village named Lavenham. There was one main street, where the many colourful thatched houses leaned drunkenly into each other down the hill. We booked into the Swan Hotel, a famous landmark often used in BBC films and tourist promotions. After dinner we strolled to one of several local pubs. The tiny pub seated about twenty or thirty, and on this quiet summer evening only eight or ten of the local men were slowly sipping their pints.

 

Lavenham

houses staggering

down the main street

 

Eric told me that most of the people in Lavenham were named Faiers, and that afternoon we had met several locals who duly turned out to be distant blood relatives. The facial features were quite amazing, many of the people having the same narrow configuration around the nose and eyes as my father and brother and myself.

 

To further make his point, my dad asked if anyone in the pub was named Faiers. All the locals nodded assent, and then he asked, “How many of you spell Faiers F-A-I-E-R-S?” Again all nodded yes, and Eric said, “A round for all the Faierses in the house!” The locals didn’t seem to mind this bit of showboating by the dapper little Yank with the long-haired son, and everyone drank a toast to the name Faiers.

 

balding father

hippie son

in an ancient pub

 

The next morning Eric dragged me out of bed early, and we had bacon and eggs in a café on the main street. We were quiet, as I was still waking up, not being used to early rising. As we were preparing to leave, an old gentleman who had been sipping his tea approached and said, “Good Morning, Mr. Faiers, and Good Morning to you too, Master Faiers.” One of the regulars from the night before had recognized us, and it was a welcome way to greet the morning, feeling a part of the history of a town where our family name had been the mainstay since at least 1066, when the Domesday census was collected.

 

 

 

 

057. Haiku Sequence : Montreal interlude

 

                        Botanical garden

                        following the ginkgo leaf stamp

                        on a little girl's wrist

 

                        Tea garden—

                        the path past a stone lantern

                        leads to the koi

 

                        my veil catches

                        on Indian Physic above

                        blood red begonias

 

                        Shade garden—

                        a bee reluctant to go back

                        into the sun

                        under the bridge

                        a white koi pauses

                        just below my feet

 

                        Celtic tree—

                        the druid's cape doesn't cover

                        his Nike's

 

                        afternoon tour

                        on the river  train

                        our own butterfly

 

                        sound of thunder

                        from the creaking train

                        the scent of hyssop

 

                        First Native garden

                        she points at the apples

                        our African guide

 

                        shards of light

                        over Water's Edge

                        the sound of her voice

 

                        from his hand to mine

                        a bottle of green tea

                        — his frog earring

 

                        amber light—

                        his puppet discarded

                        the puppeteer eats alone

 

 

 

 

058. Evening Star  (sequence)

 

final day

film festival—

fade to sunlight

 

Deb Koen

 

the stone fence

unevenly put together

summer  heat

Bruce Ross

 

autumn colors

we let mother lie

about our childhood

 

Marcus Larsson

 

widow

shelling beans

from another’s garden

 

Merrill Ann Gonzales

 

old pond

another floater

in my right eye

 

Scott Mason

 

withered roses

my weekend

for child custody

 

Stephen A. Peters

 

football weather

I consider a codicil

to my will

 

Billie Wilson

 

empty closet

a spider web

without a spider

 

Gregory Hopkins

 

reddening apples—

my newborn tries to suckle

the orchard air

 

Dejah Leger

 

job promotion—

one ant carries the largest

piece of leaf

 

Raquel D. Bailey

 

family headstone—

I whisper names

not carved

 

John Soules

 

fern fronds

tightly coiled—

the foetus kicks

 

 

Peggy Willis Lyles

 

netted butterflies—

a curl escapes

the Amish girl’s cap

 

Linda Jeannette Ward

 

our long bathtub soak—

a ring around

the moon

 

David Giacalone

 

 

 

 

059. Tan Renga 

 

hoarfrost—

packing away the window box

I breathe in thyme

 

bacon and eggs sizzle

as the children bicker

 

 

 

 

060. One Saturday Night, Just Thinking

 

I was out of the country, twenty-three years ago, when they took you from the wreckage. I was out of the country when they placed you in the coffin.

 

You were eighteen that last time I saw you, wearing that shirt you loved, the one you stole from Martin. It looked suddenly too big for you, and your face was cold and swollen and our kisses couldn’t wake you.

 

I still have that photo ID of you that you had done when you were fifteen for the school holiday to Italy. Oh Gerard, my young brother, you look so handsome. I kiss that photo often. I kiss it now. But the kisses can never wake you.

 

How useless time is, when it’s all spent.

 

    on the table an hour

    a central star widens

    in the sliced lemon

 

 

 

061. Sea of Stars

 

As a father, it’s in my nature to enjoy the idea that my toddler children think I have supreme knowledge of the secrets of the universe.  Most of the time, I have no idea what the answers are to the questions they pose, but somehow I manage to tell them something that satisfies their curiosity.  At the moment, my three year-old son has paralyzed me with his latest inquiry, “How do starfish poop?”

 

          country night

          clinging to a rock

                          in a sea of stars

 

 

 

 

062. Tan-renga

 

a winter morning--

at six-thirty in the rain

chickens out scratching

                   Paul O. Williams

 

   but for one at rest

   under a wheelbarrow

                    Michael Dylan Welch

 

 

 

063. Tan-renga

 

passing the scarecrow

the homeless man seems jealous

of  his job

                  

     porcupine quills

     in the lost dog's nose

                  

 

 

 

 

064. Exploration around the Central Edge

 

Chichester on a brightening blue February day during the coldest British winter in twenty years, and warming up, spring-like – cool wind through warm sunshine.

 

Not sure, what to think, what to feel, what to relate, what to write. Things here are just so. I’m in need of an edge, a tension to quicken, excite and move me along its lines, or across to another side that such an edge would create.

 

Chichester trying

to tell me something

I begin to sense

 

All day long looking out through the day, considering maybe there isn’t such an “edge” here, because here is the centre of “itself” – a balanced place, far from the circumference – an inner edge!

 

walking around

centripetal streets

pull me in

 

Relaxed and easy. The winters are mostly soft and mild, but all this becomes my edge; right bang in the middle. It’s anew edge, and a new place for an edge. It seems to be on its own terms this middle, central, inner edge that is nevertheless an edge as edges go. With this in place and equally in mind, I proceed, altered to Chichester, through the remainder of the day…

 

 

 

 

fin

 

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