New Haiku

Cetologists identify whales by the scars and general wear of their flukes, their idiosyncratic calling cards slipping into the deep again, marking years by disappearance and reappearance. When we moved in May, I thought I’d do the same with pigeons.

They must be as distinctive, I figured, and I meant to know my new neighborhood by its non-human citizens. For a time, on every walk exploring the new streets around us, I scrutinized each bird that lingered on the sidewalk. I meant to memorize a few, sure I’d meet some familiarity eventually.

Of course, I failed. The proliferation of pigeon colors and patterns can’t be captured by one mind, at least not one as small as mine. Even if I thought I remembered their odd, mixed variations of gray and white and brown, who could be sure? Was this pigeon a friend?

Over the last eight months, since abandoning my blog, I’ve written little, only haiku, and part of me discounts those seventeen (or so) syllables as frivolity, too easy to matter for much. They’re pigeons, perhaps beautiful if you’re prone to scrutinize but likely just another square of a sea’s surface or a patch of sky… more of the same.

Ezra Pound, a great lover of haiku, said, “The image itself is speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.” If so, I wonder what those images add up to and how a person might turn so many disparate moments into anything comprehensive or consoling.

In May of 2015, I wrote a haiku,

eventually

enough raindrops will

wet this field

Maybe. If nothing else, belief intends sense. Each haiku promises content, however fleeting. My pigeon friends gather en masse in a parking lot near where I live. A step in their direction sends them wheeling into the air, and every distinction between them vanishes in shuddering wings and new perspectives of their flight. They’re no longer verifiably separate.

If haiku accomplish so much, perhaps that’s enough. When I was four, I remember scooting along the curb after a storm, my feet driving a wave of rainwater ahead of me. That instant persists because I seldom feel such power now. I’d like to write something substantial—a novel, a poem worthy of public attention, a collection of essays or short stories—and instead settle for the fitful awareness in haiku—they might add up, or, at the other extreme, one will be the apparition of faces in a crowd, petals plastered against a background making them visible at last.

One of Basho’s loveliest haiku reads,

winter solitude—

in a world of one color

the sound of the wind

Aren’t we always hoping for that, connectedness and singularity, belonging and the strange joy of feeling so?

I saw a pigeon recently I was sure I’d recall. It was ginger rather than gray, and one wing feather was a white vee, the other not. Turning to me as if it knew me, its strut faced my direction. I thought it spoke, issuing a challenge to be known and understood.

No haiku occurred to me, but I knew then what haiku is.

Thursday Haibun (Episode Last)

It’s no longer April. Still I’m offering the last of my haiku and prose in haibun. I’ve been writing one (or so) a day as part of NaPoWriMo (Poem a Day Writing Month). The entries below are the last attempts I made in this exercise.

lxxvi.

koi curve

beneath the surface

flirting

If I bear down, I remember watching my children draw and the way concentration collected in their faces, especially heads and brows lowered as if more shade might make paper more visible. Maybe I’m inventing, but a scent returns. It’s tempera mixed with dried sweat and the day’s weather clinging to their clothes.

My son once loved volcanoes and drew countless versions of truncated triangles spewing fire and dripping red that divided over and over like tree roots to the mountain’s base. My daughter sketched birds flattened by her conception to resemble the warning shapes affixed to windows. Past their form, they became an excuse for elaborate coloring.

she sees

dimensions in blank planes

and fills

Somewhere is a box containing my children’s art, ages 2-11, and I evoke it sometimes when I can’t sleep and begin mentally cataloging memory. This box doesn’t close as most cardboard boxes do. Its top is like a tray with walls and lifts on and off. When you remove it, you hear a faint but audible suction as air rushes to fill the new space created. The white surface, yellowed by age, shows signs of tape added and removed, scuffed to brown where previous seals lifted the surface layer off. Written on top, in sharpy, in handwriting I’d recognize as my own, is “Kids Art.” As far as I know, no one has looked inside it in ten years. I remember the box better than its contents. I can’t say exactly where we’ve put it.

Containers move with my family, so that—gathering things again—I encounter boxes that once held copier paper from my first job or bottles of a spirit now evaporated from the marketplace. The sides and top display three names, two crossed out: bedroom, closet, storage.

three a.m.—apartments

stacked in towers beam

rest or worry

lxxvii.

My dreams often intrude on sleep, scratching night’s table like an absent-minded vandal who doesn’t want to spell and doesn’t want to speak. The meal never arrives.

that blood is

your artery’s extremity

diverting once more

lxxviii.

a neglected play,

this classroom map—plot and

characters swimming

My ninth grade history teacher taught me geographical terms I tried to inject in conversation—never in the way they were meant to be used. Few arose naturally in my flat gulf coastal hometown of La Marque, Texas anyway. Instead, I’d toss them into remarks just to see if anyone might call me on them. “That’s an especially veldt shirt,” I’d say, or “I’m pretty sure question seven was the most escarpment one on the quiz.” Or “Isthmus watch Star Trek tonight.”

after a storm

earthworms litter the street

like relaxed numbers

Of course the kids in my history class called me out, but everyone else did too. People might ask, “Excuse me?” or “What did you say?” but they might also say, “You’re using that word wrong.” If I asked how I should use it, many said, “I don’t know… but not that way.”

My best friend did me one better by inventing an alternate means of describing teachers in geographical terms. My English teacher, for instance, sometimes combed his butte before class or exposed his heath by leaving one too few shirt buttons buttoned, our science teacher, who was fond of wearing gaucho pants, always drew her mohair cardigan closed in front to guard her too ample pampas, and our gym teacher wore gray coaches shorts barely long enough for his eastern peninsula.

whispering—

a hissing broadcast

losing air

When the history curriculum left geography for actual events, my friend’s experiments with metaphor and innuendo sought other terms, but I’m sure I learned something.

drunken spider,

your wheel won’t roll

or window close

lxxix.

You had cats, plural, but I only met the one you proffered the time we sat together on your couch. I think you might have said more to the cat than me and all of it in a cartoon voice I didn’t recognize. But sitting there, I wasn’t someone I recognized either, and you recognized that.

statues’ shadowed eyes,

noses hooked to block light—

sundials

lxxx.

My younger brother did most of the manly acts in our family household. A Boy Scout, he paddled Canadian lakes and at home he road his bike to the levies trying day after day to catch a 50 lb. alligator gar on 25 lb. test. When he succeeded he gave the gar away and rode home again. He played baseball. He watched hunting shows on Sunday morning.

And I wished to be so manly, but each expedition found me trailing along, imitating the acts of others, and making transparently small talk.

a puffed cloud,

its strut behind a mountain

pretense

If my mind were a house, I’d stand in the doorway, most of my thoughts turned inside, and longing turned out.

lxxxi.

sewing machine

pecking— its engine clearing

its throat—attacking

No one ever convinces anyone else to stay for long. The loops including two people bound by pleas are threads. The fiber cuts, strains, and snaps. The bed divides. The night tugs.

Thursday Haibun (Episode Four)

Once again, as part of NaPoWriMo (Poem a Day Writing Month) I’m offering haiku and prose in haibun. I have one more  Thursday in April. The entries below are attempts from the last few days. The numbers communicate how far I’ve traveled in this exercise.

lxxi.

folding a sheet

under a half-moon—a sail

and light put away

As probably everyone does, I turn my pillow to find its cool side. My new posture—collecting the compressed mass under my head and resting on my ribs—discovers my heartbeat, pounding like a wake to a shore.

you maybe said

time was near—I heard bells

clashing

Getting up never seems easy. Slow or fast or delayed or denied, it ruins two states. Dreams end in cataclysm and consciousness starts in shock. I suppose in some past the transition was gentle, dawning birds and light and warmth, but I don’t know that.

already someone’s

steps echo from the corner—

begin again

the day’s first words

skid in my throat—I collect

sound to speak

lxxii.

You told me not to say it, not in words but in your expression—a starched smile, eyes barely alive—and still I went ahead. Light dimmed. The sun seemed hooded through blinds, and shadows strained to reach across the carpet.

in profile,

a crow shows one eye—looking

or not, who knows?

lxxiii.

Nanette Wagoner couldn’t like me, and I knew that, should have known that. Something set her on, and, in three days, she sent me note after note filled with words. I only knew her face and didn’t read the messages really, just weighed their length and followed the loops of letters to the end. One day, she’d be taller than I would, I saw that. We shared no classes, but when she laughed just inside my hearing, the sound buzzed in my chest.

If she liked me, I would like her.

what a wonder

day falls—the sun drowning

over and over

Of course she lost interest, but the notes anchored a drawer for years, proof of appeal, a place.

lxxiv.

I stole a large canvas laundry bin from my dorm and rolled it, full of my possessions, from 123^th to 113^th where friends lived. My classmate and his fiancé may not both have wanted me but felt sorry enough to let me stay for a time. My year—not even a year—in New York ended, and I wouldn’t return to school. I thought of working while I found a job, pictured bearing satchels while bicycling through traffic. Without prospects though, who could believe something so hard?

green peach,

what sign told you

to drop?

This trip started with my telling my girlfriend goodbye. She’d asked for one more night and cried, still we’d agreed to no more. She’d never left her other boyfriend, the weekends I pretended not to know her were sad, and another year of schooling awaited her and not me. Time expired.

The wheels, barely bigger than casters, danced under the load, and no effort I made to guide my craft by pushing the correct corner kept it from fishtailing, sometimes into a current of pedestrians flowing the opposite direction. I said, “I’m sorry” one hundred times. Early summer heat already rose in the first hours of sun, and by the time I reached my friends’ buzzer, I was soaked, shirt and pants clinging. He laughed to see me exhausted by such a silly journey, but helped with my load, soon to be a pile in the corner of his living room.

beneath the surface,

beneath its skin, beasts move—

the sea still

In another two weeks my brother would drive up from home, and I’d leave for good. My possessions never left their boxes. I watched my friend study at what I’d abandoned and plan his next steps over terrain that slid under my feet.

steady thump

of highway seams, dawn slanted

just wrong

lxxv.

Doing the dishes, I occasionally splash water on my shirtfront and spend the next hour flapping the fabric to dry it. Something about the act reminds me of childhood, restless winging, the tug to what’s next.

I blink

between scenes and still

never move

Thursday Haibun (Episode Three)

I’m celebrating NaPoWriMo (Poem a Day Writing Month) by writing haiku and prose in haibun. I’m posting them each Thursday in April. The entries below are yesterday’s attempts. The numbers communicate how many I’ve written so far.

 liii.

Wandering the neighborhood when I was young, I passed a juniper bush and pulled dusty, blue-gray berries from branches and squeezed them between finger and thumb. The scent rising from the collision improved on any cologne I knew.

a gust rubs

leaves together—the rough sound

affection

Some smells affect me still. I can’t smell bayberry and balsam without thinking about Christmas or licorice without thinking of Easter.

a child told me

the chalk was hers, the drawing

her sister’s

I can’t smell bergamot without thinking of that afternoon in London when, having spent the day at the National Museum after finding no one to share my excursion, I wandered into a shop and ordered Earl Grey. It was after tea time and too early for supper. The evening stretched over the scarred table, all the pocks and pits craters in my close attention. Then my waitress sat down with me, asking me question after question until I felt I’d had an adventure.

We said goodbye knowing we knew one another.

incidental—

morning’s attention to

a lost glove

liv.

Watch enough sci-fi and you think of meeting extraterrestrials, stretching, stretching, stretching to imagine something outside your conception. If you really reached such possibilities, you’d be lost—words and gestures and emotions disparate, a meeting of rock and rock.

sparrow, I see you—

air separates us, time stalls

between us

lv.

One of my college roommates taught me to drive stick using my other roommate’s car. We never told him. In the Sunday parking lot, I lurched from start to stop, and soon the whole affair became purely laughable. We lifted into an ether of hilarity and sometimes had to pause to breathe enough oxygen. The car complained, but we didn’t. We enjoyed everything absurd in it, as, at that moment, we thought anyone would.

windows filmed:

I look out—the broken

gaze of shutters

Some weeks later, the car’s clutch died. I never spoke to either roommate about it, ducking my head to avoid revelation.

the last page—

notes I don’t understand

in my hand

lvi.

Sometimes reviewing memories means thinking of all I might have said. When my colleague asked, I didn’t exactly say what happened and, when she wanted to know about what he said, well…

outside this room,

arguing—her voice sings

a half-pitch too high

The problem is honesty—it always is—and what the occasion occasions and what transpires. I want to be proud. Instead, I feel flushed with confusion.

 inside this box,

another—another in that—

deep promises

She asked me. She asked what had been said against her and who spoke on her behalf. I remember she wanted to know, “Who was in the room?” and “Did you defend me?” They were questions I’d been instructed not to answer by people I cared less about. They were questions more likely than anyone in the room acknowledged.

Still, I said nothing. I quailed. Maybe I feared for my job.

hens’ posture

in the yard—strutting

inside the wire

 lvii.

When the sun sags toward buildings, I think it’s lazy, exhausted by its relentless, unvarying journey. I know that’s me—I’m tired.

the orchids

take days—grins unopened,

unknown

lviii.

I said you didn’t know me though I know you did.

at the bottom

a message—a moment’s

scrawl, wriggling

A sort of quiet calls for respect. You spoke and waited, watching me form responses from air. You may have known how little could be said, how evidence conspires, how a halting voice says more than words.

leaves reversed

awaiting rain, their gray

an extra face

We barely saw each other through dusk, as was proper. The edge of trees lost themselves in night sky.

 lix.

Consider this: everyone has embarrassment to recall.

two cars both ease

into a crossroad, close

enough to meet eyes

In fifth grade, Mrs. Cullen read my hijacked my note to Linda McClinton aloud. Mrs. Cullen emoted where the text demanded—the moment I said I really liked Linda and didn’t understand why she didn’t like me. The class laughed, especially Linda.

What choice did I have but to laugh too? The moment belonged in a book, the passage underlined.

Thursday Haibun (Episode Two)

As I wrote last Thursday, I’m celebrating NaPoWriMo (Poem a Day Writing Month) by writing haiku and prose in haibun. The entries below are yesterday’s attempts. The numbers communicate how many I’ve written so far.

xli.

Many days I pass the same man begging. I know his name now—Jimmy—and he often asks for money by saying, “Make Jimmy happy.” Though I’m sure I can’t, I give him a dollar, easy enough for me to spare, a greater source of relief for him than for me. When he shakes my hand, I feel the leather of his palm—winter, summer, a life outside I don’t know. When I smile, he recognizes the sign and smiles back.

His eyes never smile.

this hour

sun takes cover—buildings

won’t hold light back

One day, walking to work, having just given Jimmy his dollar, another pedestrian doubled back from just ahead of me.

“You shouldn’t be giving him money!” he said.

I said nothing.

“He spends it on crack! He’s a crack-head. I know. I was on it too, and he said, ‘Give me some money, I’ll bust your ass!’”

Anger streamed from him. His expression stretched, neither smile, nor snarl, nor surprise. He touched me on the upper arm.

“Sure,” I said, “I hear you.”

at intersections

waiting for clearance—the street

slick with weeping

 xlii.

I suppose it’s nothing special that after some runs—during the time I was really running—steam rose from my shoulders and chest as it does from horses. I felt like an animal.

What must I do to have that moment happen again?

sun glances

from the lake’s horizon and

stops ascending

 xliii.

too early,

your voice blunders into quiet—

we both know now

I wonder if you sensed us stepping around you. The evening creeping from the sliding glass door drew the ornate shadow of the la-z-boy’s reach. Your neck, vulnerable, rolled like a snake to the side. You snored.

“let statues lie,”

she said, as if choice lay

with them

xliv.

In another life as a sleeper, I run from words. They seem too plain to evoke. They define and refine until they speak exactly. Say what you will of abstraction, it eludes reality and the relentless chore of logic.

from the window,

a rectangle of light, marking

a far wall

In a recent dream, I spoke to the freshly departed. They entered the room one at a time and greeted me as old friends even when we’d barely spoken. I tried to be polite, offering what I had, which, in this dream, was a pair of mittens and a broken wine glass—the base, the stem, and half the blossom.

wind ruffles

open books, smiling pages

touched

Finally I settled with someone I didn’t know, exchanging phrases and listening enough to pick up the twisted thread of precedents.

you read loss,

lines of levels dropping—

eyelids half-fallen

Closing time arrived. I rose to leave. I shook a hand I wasn’t certain I knew. I left a card on a table, sure it wasn’t mine.

Thursday Haibun (Episode One)

I learned this week that I missed NaHaiWriMo (Haiku a Day Writing Month), which was March. But, no matter, I write a haiku a day anyway, and I’m celebrating NaPoWriMo (Poem a Day Writing Month) with extra vigor, writing haiku and prose in haibun. I also cheated by starting early—I’m on spring break right now and won’t be next week—and so I’m writing more than one haibun a day.

As promised, I’m posting them on Thursdays during April. These are today’s output. I’ve kept the numbers assigned to them.

xx.

Some rains keep the world dark all day, and some people appreciate steady half-light, steady pelting, steady captivity. I enjoy rain too if life waits. On days I’m happy to rest, I stand at my window, watch the lake form at a nearby intersection, and study people leaping it as if in a steeplechase or, like ants blocked by a finger, weave left and right seeking the proper place to ford the more-than-puddle before them. It’s just a puddle to me… or will be until the clock demands departure, need calls, or some summons insists. Then I learn all this time my study has been practical, teaching me how to enter the unwanted, to bear it instead of looking from afar.

sitting in a bath

I listen to the faucet’s

persistent tears

 xxi.

In fourth grade, when I returned from Christmas vacation, Molly’s desk sat empty. I wasn’t surprised because she missed so much school, and, when she was there, she skipped music and art and recess to fill worksheets she hadn’t seen yet. Molly’s skin was as near translucent as I could imagine, blue networks visible just beneath the surface—every visible surface—and her blonde hair grew thin like grass in poisoned soil. She didn’t look at me much, and we hardly ever spoke, but I knew her eyes even when I closed mine. They said surrender. Their pale and weary blue slid from the sky, too tired to stay aloft.

chalk dust

on the blackboard’s edges,

ghosts on the border

I was sitting in my desk as Mrs. Mitchell gathered Molly’s things—a few books, some supplies, but nothing that said Molly really, nothing like the eccentric mess under everyone else’s desktop. When Mrs. Mitchell told the class Molly died before New Year’s Eve, some people already knew and a few cried or fought tears. I must not have believed it. The whole day seemed temporary to me, every worksheet another Molly would have to do.

beyond curtains,

outside the window, you see

air stirring

 xxii.

 last night, a cheer rose

from many neighbors’ houses—

I don’t know why

In any alphabetical list I’m almost always the middle. I like to count how many precede and follow me, happy when it’s even.

xxiii.

On the first day of a Shakespeare class I asked the students why they were there. One of them answered, “Because he’s famous.” I’d heard that response before, of course, but never so baldly put.

My daughter was in kindergarten that year, and, on the drive home, I asked her, “Honey, do you know who Shakespeare is?”

“He wears pumpkin pants,” she said.

unbound,

the newspaper still holds

its curl

xxxiv.

When I can’t sleep, I look for morning’s signs—the first defined shadows, a car sweeping by, a word uttered on the sidewalk in front of our house. The alarm often comes first.

in skyscrapers

half a mile away, checkered lights

of company