Tag Archives: nature

1 1/2 haibun

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Last night, I awoke from a dream of my childhood, startled to find tears in my eyes. There were the four of us children together, including my long dead brother, second in age, just older than I, and thus relegated to the task of keeping me on the proper path of life, as determined by whatever demons and angels that informed his conscience. In the dream, he was chiding me for some transgression which I have now lost to memory, as happens with dreams. I only know that, when I awoke, I was filled with such a love and tenderness for him as I haven’t felt since he died, many years ago. I got up and looked out the window, at the snow-covered landscape revealed by the light of a streetlamp, and what came to me was the final sentence of James Joyce’s story, The Dead:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Which in turn put me in mind of the Michael P. Smith song, The Dutchman, especially this verse:

When Amsterdam is golden in the summer,
Margaret brings him breakfast,
She believes him.
He thinks the tulips bloom beneath the snow.

What came out of all this before I went back to bed was a trio of haiku, or, I suppose more accurately, two haiku and one senryu.

The Winter snow
Falls equally
On living and dead

No tulips bloom
Beneath the snow
Only dreams

Heaven and hell
Are but regions of the heart
With contested borders

Snow, again

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Unbidden, it comes all the same
Without malice, unaware and uninterested
In our dreams or desires

Without even innocence
Its promise of sweet seclusion
Sequestered beneath the pale sameness

Dissolving in the salty mired streets
White and gray in a death spiral
A love embrace unlike any

Seen since the last snowfall
What may be, what could be
Belong to the feckless air

Oh, I can dream, all right
But only until recalled
By bickering gulls

Geese barking orders,
Or the shrill outrage of the
Woodpecker’s call

A field mouse trips nervously
Across an ice dam
Vultures patrol the freeway

Food from top to bottom
Interested only in replication
The slaughter of millions

But a byproduct of procreation
So long as enough survive to breed
Or not, and even then,

Some beast waits anxiously in the wings
For just enough change
Just enough opportunity

And still, falls the snow.

As green withers and falls

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As green withers and falls
It’s good to recall those other seasons
So sprung from desolation
Beneath the last and desperate snow

A boon of tenderness
Determined to catch light in its beams
Lifted itself in ignorant jubilation
Here and there, all unaware
Of its own irrelevant and unfailing
Death

All unaware, in its motishness
That such small impertinence
Begins the crack
Of winter’s back

That such improbable spiraling doom
Begets a new and ancient season
Again and again and again
In the deep and undisturbed
Rhythm of the universe

In defence of heterogeny

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Why doubt purity?
As if anything beyond a quark
Is in and of itself alone
As if essence were not a judgment
As if some notion, come to rest in a brain
Came bolting from divine dispatch
As if a single idea
Can express the contradictions
Of matter and spirit

Purists fling darts
From the comfort of the bubble,
Close ranks against orthodoctaroons
Remove splinters with exquisite surgery
All the while resembling utterly
The objects of their disdain

The truth is
The sum of our differences vanishes
Beside the sum of our sameness.

Fern Hill, by Dylan Thomas

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If I had to choose the single biggest influence on my poetry, it would be Dylan Thomas. The wild, unexpected images, at once daring and inevitable, just turned my head as a young man. Here’s one of my favorites.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

I find the last two lines especially poignant.