Fresh snow—
the child fills the trailer
of her toy truck.
*
Packaging the cold ground meat,
my hand turns numb.
*
Netted tight & stacked
by the American Legion,
the unsold firs.
*
A barn cat by the compost
hisses in defense of eggshells.
*
The creek at dusk:
doves crowd in to drink
from the dark water.
*
Christmas Eve, & sleep’s in short supply
as sleet ticks on the windows.
Gakumon wa... haiga by Yosa Buson (photo by ionushi on Flickr, Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license)
Gakumon wa ketsu kara nukeru hotaru kana
(Study/scholarship as-for, ass from exiting/emitting firefly [exclamatory particle])
All this study—
it’s coming out your ass,
oh firefly!
*
I found this gem while looking for a photo of one of Buson’s haiga (haiku illustration, a proto-Manga-like genre he did much to advance) as a possible addition to Sunday’s post. It comes courtesy of Mexican blogger and man-of-letters Aurelio Asiain, who, as it happens, now teaches at the very college in Japan where I spent a formative year as an exchange student back in 1985-86.
This is as close to an outright simile as a haiku can get. Notice that there’s no firefly in the painting, which acts as a kind of commentary on the poem. In the absence of any additional information, one could certainly read this as a poem about a firefly whose diligent study bears fruit in the radiance coming from his abdomen. But the facial expression of the figure in the painting encourages a more Rabelaisian interpretation. Notice, further, the placement of the text in relation to the figure, the calligraphy suggesting curls of vapor. This is a fart joke.
It translates particularly well into modern American English, since “talking out one’s ass” is such a popular way to characterize know-it-all bloviating. Intellectual pursuits had a much higher value in Edo-period Japan, though, where students and scholars were often poetically said to study by firefly light — a conceit that survives to this day:
“Keisetsu-jidadi” which literally translates into “the era of the firefly and snow,” means one’s student days. It derives from the Chinese folklore and refers to studying in the glow of the fireflies and snow by the window. There is also an expression “Keisetsu no kou” which means “the fruits of diligent study.”
So Buson’s insight consists simply in pointing out where on its anatomy the firefly’s light emerges.
We shouldn’t be surprised that such a humorous haiku came from the brush of one of the greatest haiku masters. Humor and earthiness were primarily what distinguished haiku and haikai no renga from the much older renga (linked verse) tradition in the first place. In social terms, haiku poetry represented a middle-class appropriation and popularization of what had been a very aristocratic pursuit. And Japan was and remains an earthy culture; there’s nothing like the split between classical and vernacular views of the body which has afflicted Westerners since the Renaissance. Buson was able to paint equally well in a high-brow Chinese style and in the cartoonish fashion seen here, just as Chaucer included the Knights Tale and the Miller’s Tale in the same work.
These are my picks from the first 61 haiku at the new/old photoblog. They’re all in response to photos from January-March 2008, and seem to make a half-decent sequence, especially with the line-breaks removed.
a shining pile of deer guts — I want to pick out all the hairs
kernals of sun through the holes in the old corncrib
in the spotlight’s glare, the dark sky dissolves into snowflakes
foggy woods: the sassafras follows a crooked route to the sky
around the stalks where bees hummed in August, sparkles on the snow
January, and the vernal pond is capped by green ice
dead locust bark: fungal white, algal green, alive between the cracks
inside the deer fence, the 200-year-old white oak isn’t stirring
mares’ tails — interrupting my reverie, a sharp-shinned hawk
damp with snowmelt, the oak log’s colors are so bright, I have to touch it
through a handprint on the fogged-up window, icicles, sunrise
fresh snow: a boil on the black birch looks good enough to lick
beside the woods road, a single stalk of grass pointing toward town
no less grotesque for being spindly — south roof icicles
the silence seems deepest beside the oak with a huge round opening
fog drifts through branches locked under a coat of ice
dried seedheads get to bloom a second time — icy meadow
far below freezing, the pond ice grows a quilt of downy hoarfrost
snow melts to show the mountain’s true skin, salamander-slick
drifted snow — a doe follows the bootprints as far as she can
snowy right-of-way: weed stalks stipple the mountain laurel’s shadow
snow-bound woods: root hairs on a toppled tree are the only gossamer
I remember every place I’ve seen that amber — moon in eclipse
the snow’s so deep, any arrangement of sticks seems significant
the winter barn: a faint smell of summer from an open door
milkweed silk has frozen in mid-spill — snowy field
in the snow under an impaled rag of a leaf, something squeaks
Hunger Moon snow: skinny shadows lead to thorny trunks
deep in the woods, the setting sun fingers two witch hazels
fleshy leaves ideal for the indoor desert face the snow
only the hawk’s inner eyelids have fallen shut, white, white
such a presence — the snow all around it is flecked with black
their calls must’ve changed: no hint of Canada now in these local geese
forty blackbirds gurgle and creak in the ash tree — spring snow
melted except where the giant snowblower blew, a phantom road
Whenever I have to bang out a bunch of haiku, I like to read from the masters for inspiration. I’ve been avoiding translations which I suspect to be very good, such as Robert Hass’ The Essential Haiku, because I’m afraid they will make me lazy. The best way to read Japanese haiku, as far as I’m concerned, is with the aid of a truly terrible English translation by someone like Harold G. Henderson or R. H. Blyth, so I’ll be forced to refer to the Japanese text and, if present, the syllable-by-syllable literal translation. I’ve forgotten most of the Japanese I studied in college, but at least I remember the basics, such as how the grammar works and how to use a kanji dictionary. Attempting to translate poetry is one of the best ways I know to fully engage with it. Today I thought I’d preserve not just my attempts, but also some of the thoughts that got me there.
Yosa Buson (1716-1783) is generally considered one of the four greatest writers of what we now call haiku (the others being Basho, Issa, and Shiki), and he was a brilliant painter and sketch artist to boot. Though ambiguity has always been prized in Japanese poetry, Buson took it to the limit in some of his haiku. Others, of course, are entirely straightforward. Here are a few of each.
***
Nashi no hana tsuki no fumiyomu onna ari
The blossoming pear—
a woman reads a letter
in the moonlight.
*
Is it live, or is it metaphor? Other translators tend to make this a bit more instrumental and say “by moonlight,” but the grammatical structure suggests that letter-reading woman is to moon as blossom is to pear tree.
***
Shigi tôku kuwa sugusu mizu no uneri kana
A distant snipe.
Rinsing off the hoe,
how the water quakes!
*
The association here may be with the circling, diving courtship display of a common snipe (Gallinago gallinago) at dusk, or simply its zig-zag flight when flushed. The verb uneru means to undulate, meander, surge, swell, roll, etc.
***
Kura narabu ura wa tsubame no kayoi michi
Behind the warehouse row,
a road busy with the back-and-forth
of barn swallows.
*
This is Hirundo rustica gutturalis, a different subspecies but substantially the same bird familiar to Europeans and North Americans.
***
Yado kase to katan nage dasu fubuki kana
“A night’s lodging!”
and the sword thrown down—
a gust of snow.
*
Buson really makes the little words work hard. The Japanese particle to attributes the opening phrase to someone — we’re left to imagine who — while at the same time introducing the down-thrown-sword gust of snow.
***
Me ni ureshi koi gimi no sen mashiro nari
As utterly blank as it is,
I can’t stop looking
at my lover’s fan.
*
The archaic mashiro means “pure white,” but the contrast with the norm — brightly painted fans — is clearly in play here. And though we might not share the premodern Japanese attraction to pure white skin, our fashion photography suggests we still understand the sexiness of a blank expression.
***
Enma-Ô no kuchi ya botan o hakan to su
The King of Hell’s mouth:
peony petals ready
to be spat out.
*
The King of Hell in popular East Asian Buddhist iconography is always shown with an angry, open mouth. Is Buson looking at a statue of Enma-Ô and imagining a peony, or vice versa? I picture an aged, pink peony blossom in a state of partial collapse.
***
Kujira ochite iyo-iyo takaki o age kana
The diving whale—
how its tail keeps going
up!
*
Iyo-iyo means both “increasingly” and “at last.” There’s probably a better way of conveying that dual sense in English than what I’ve gone with here.
***
Kari yoroi ware ni najimaru samusa kana
Fitting the borrowed
armor to my body—
Christ it’s cold!
*
The last line is not, of course, a literal translation of samusa kana, but in modern colloquial American English, it’s hard to imagine exclaiming about the cold without deploying at least a mild curse.
***
Sakura chiru nawashiro mizu ya hoshizuki yo
Cherry petals
in the rice-seedling water,
moon and stars.
*
Another conjunction that’s not entirely a metaphor, but could be if you wanted.
***
Ichi gyô no kari ya hayama ni tsuki o in su
All in one line, the wild geese,
and the moon in the foothills
for a seal.
*
Nature as calligraphic painting.
***
Asa giri ya e ni kaku yume no hito dôri
Morning fog—
the road full of people from
a painter’s dream.
*
Fog, mist, haze: the East Asian landscape painter’s way of collapsing time and distance.
***
Tsurigane ni tomarite nemuru kochô kana
On the temple’s
great bell,
a butterfly sleeps.
*
“Bell” is of course entirely inadequate. The English word conjures up a clanging or tolling thing with a clapper, nothing like the booming bronze behemoth meant here. Tomarite — “stopping,” “lodging” — seems redundant in translation.
This butterfly is the Buson equivalent of Basho’s ancient ponderous frog. So many interpretations, so much weighty critical analysis! How can it possibly sleep?
***
Utsutsu naki tsumami gokoro no kochô kana
Not quite real,
this sensation of pinching—
a butterfly.
This haiku is notoriously hard to pin down: is the sensation one that a human feels, holding a butterfly by the wings, or is it — as the grammar seems to suggest — the butterfly who feels this not-quite-real sensation? Personally, I favor a third view: that the sensation is the experience of a human on whose finger a butterfly has landed. Butterflies can cling quite tightly — I don’t think it would be a stretch to use the verb tsumamu for that — and when they then begin to mine the grooves in your finger for salt with their long proboscis, the sensation is very strange indeed.
***
Asa kaze no ka o fukimiyoru kemushi kana
Morning breezes
play in the hair
of a caterpillar.
*
As with the temple-bell butterfly haiku, there’s an extra verb here (miyoru, “can be seen”) that really doesn’t need to be translated. Even without it, the poem is all about perspective.
***
Kin byô no usu mono wa dare ka aki no kaze
Whose thin clothes
still decorate the gold screen?
Autumn wind.
*
Painted on the screen, one wonders, or draped over it? I think this is another haiku that merges world and painting. Autumn wind typically conveys loneliness in Japanese poetry.
***
Shira ume ni akuru yo bakari to nari ni keri
(final deathbed poem)
The night almost past,
through the white plum blossoms
a glimpse of dawn.
*
Buson in fact died before dawn, so this glimpse, too, is an artist’s vision, poised between dream and metaphor.
Landscape With a Solitary Traveler, by Yosa Buson (courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons)
At dawn in the campground,
“The Sound of Music” on a flute.
I’m plotting murder.
*
Squatting to pluck puffballs
from a stump, her raincoat
pale in the dark woods.
*
Never mind how
you got here. Just sit,
O glacial erratic.
*
At the back of the store,
a free view of the stormy lake
moving three ways at once.
*
Not far from John Brown’s grave,
a state prison looms
above the larch.
*
When I open the Adirondack
pages of my notebook,
two grains of sand fall out.
On a moonless night in August, under the gourd-rattle din of katydids, the forest floor is dotted with blue-green lights, dim as glow-in-the-dark toys an hour after lights-out: foxfire. I grope toward one at my feet, trace the shape of the log, then break off a glowing nubbin. It’s soft & flexible, & illuminates only the thinnest circle of the hand in which it rests. I slip it into a pants pocket, thinking I’ll show the others, but when I get back, somehow I can’t bring myself to mention it. It doesn’t seem right to parade such a recondite thing as if it were a trophy. A day later, it sits hard and shriveled like a dead ear atop my computer monitor.
I dream I’m sick
& wake to find myself well.
The tree full of birds.
Hours old,
the luna moth’s wings still look
as if they don’t fit.
*
Full moon.
The starving kitten
cries for milk.
*
At school,
the squire’s moon-faced daughter
was one of many Emilys.
*
Forty years on,
I remember that new-book smell:
You Will Go To The Moon.
*
Entering a patch of moonlight
in the forest,
my sudden boots.
Enormous oak
the daylight moon in its branches
a goat at its foot
Holstein with a heart
in the middle of her forehead
loves the salt lick
Horses in the shade
of a weeping willow
a cascade of piss
Tired of dodging the persistent longhorn beetle, I finally let it land so it could verify that I was not a tree. Recovering from a week of crippling lower back pain, I was celebrating my personal Independence Day a day late, but the forest still had claims on me. I remembered the Sunday before, how my back had gone out just as I was sitting down, and the flies had landed on me just the same. We are little more than large and awkward guests in a world of insects, I sometimes think. If only we all had exoskeletons instead of these troublesome, tree-like spines!
This is how the recovery happened: I had laid down Saturday afternoon and unexpectedly fell into a deep sleep, though I had gotten plenty of sleep the night before. I dreamed I was inching across one of the high barn beams despite my bad back, a burning cigarette dangling from my lips. My father came into the barn, spotted me in the rafters, and said, “So that’s what you meant by a spiritual retreat!” When I woke up, the pain was already beginning to recede.
Fourth of July:
fireflies flash, fireworks boom,
the moon turns to fuzz.
Video link (RSS subscribers must click through to watch)
Here in Plummer’s Hollow, we almost always spot our first fawn of the season on Memorial Day weekend. This year was no exception.
Crossposted to The Clade
The bottle is the message
the river sends to the sea:
Aquafina.
*
Since the leaves came out,
the tree’s shadow no longer
resembles a tree.
*
Sunrise catches
a rabbit in the tall grass,
the veins in its ears.
*
A second set of lines
in the palm I rested on:
more leaves in my future.
*
Bobbing in the wind,
the moccasin flower’s
red-threaded net.
*
Seventeen times sadder
than fallen cherry blossoms:
cicada wings.
*
Under the bark,
that locust log was wearing
white fishnet hose.
*
Tree-shaped print
in the sand where the tide went out —
its shining trunk.
Ranko (student of Basho, fl. 17th c.)
Harusame ya yane no ogusa ni hana sakinu
Spring rain:
flowers opening
on the thatched roof.
*
Taniguchi Buson (1715-1783)
Harusame ya kawazu no hara no mada nurezu
Spring rain:
not enough yet to moisten
the frog’s belly.
*
Harusame ya monogatari yuku mino to kasa
Spring rain:
a patter of gossip
from raincoat & umbrella.
*
Harusame ya dôsha no kimi no sasamegoto
Spring rain:
my lover’s low whisper
in a shared carriage.
*
Harusame ni nuretsutsu yane no temari kana
Spring rain:
a rag ball on the roof
is getting soaked.
*
Kobayashi Issa (1762-1826)
Harusame ya ai ni aioi no matsu no koe
Spring rain:
the voices of a pair of pines
growing side by side.
*
Harusame ya yabu ni fukaruru sute tegami
Spring rain:
a discarded letter blows
into the bushes.
*
Harusame ya uo oi-nogasu ura no inu
Spring rain:
a dog on the shore
chases the fish.
*
Harusame ya na wo tsumi ni yuku ko andon
Spring rain:
going out with a small lantern
to pick vegetables.
*
Harusame ya kuware-nokori no kamo ga naku
Spring rain:
the lusty quacking of ducks
that haven’t been eaten.
*
Harusame ni ôakubi suru bijin kana
Spring rain:
a pretty woman
yawns.
*
Harusame ya imo ga tamoto ni zeni no oto
Spring rain:
in my wife’s sleeve,
the sound of coins.
*
Harusame ya neko ni odori oshieru ko
Spring rain:
a child is teaching the cat
how to dance.
*
Harusame ya hara wo herashi ni yu ni tsukaru
Spring rain:
I draw a hot bath
to settle my stomach.
***
Translated with the help of a dictionary and some imagination.
In response to the poem “moth,” by Ivy Alvarez.
The fact that I still remember the word for moth in Japanese is a bit of a fluke — I’ve forgotten so much else. But it was etched in my mind because I used to crash on the couch of a guy who had a phobia about moths, of which there were plenty on muggy summer nights in Osaka. We’d be sitting around drinking, and suddenly he’d leap up yelling “Ga! Gaaaaa!” and waving his arms about, as if trying to take flight. Order would only be restored when the intruder was killed or managed to escape.
It happens that he and I were both mooning over the same woman then, though we’d made our peace with each other. There was a certain amount of comfort, in fact, in getting drunk with someone who shared your predicament down to the smallest detail: being in love with someone who had slept with another man — even if, as in our case, we were each other’s other man. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that heterosexual male bonding can’t be a beautiful thing.
The moths were small, pale, dusty creatures, not unlike the majority of moths here in the northeastern United States. Perhaps like our moths, they represented diverse species, some of them quite rare, and distinguishable one from another sometimes only by a careful examination of their genitalia. I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking about biodiversity back then, and I was years away from reading Fabre’s classic studies that showed how moths’ acute sensitivity to pheromones makes them capable of detecting female moths from miles away. It is this capacity that allows some species to persist at very low population densities, as long as individuals of the opposite sex can still find each other on the far side of a forest, or a city — and can manage to escape moth-phobics with wildly waving arms.
And the lights, the lights. What explained the moths’ perennial and often fatal attraction to light? Centuries of tradition and the analogy with our own hormone- and alcohol-addled brains suggested that it was desire. That’s certainly how it looks. But to a moth, desire is signaled by chemicals — pheromones — picked up through the antennae. It turns out that a moth spirals into a light not out of desire but from sheer confusion. The only nighttime light of any brightness in their evolutionary history was the moon, and because the moon appears at optical infinity — far enough away that its rays are nearly parallel — it makes an excellent navigational aid. A moth can fly in a straight line simply by triangulating off the moon.
I seem to recall steadying myself by gazing at the moon on a drunken walk home more than once myself. Earlier that spring, there had been a full lunar eclipse, and I made a point of staying sober enough to appreciate it. I’ve seen three or four lunar eclipses since, and the only reason why I remember that one so vividly is because of my surprise at the aforementioned woman when, the next morning, she admitted she didn’t know the moon had been eclipsed. She had gone out with someone else, they’d had too much to drink, and when she caught sight of the blood-red moon she’d assumed the alcohol had affected her vision somehow, she said.
I wonder if she’d been with that other fellow, about whom I was still clueless at that point. How he must have danced when the moths lost their bright compass in the sky and came zeroing in, kamikaze-style, on the nearest substitute! When I think back on that time now, I really can’t recall, except in a very abstract sense, the desire I felt — only the confusion. Those lips and eyes I thought I’d never forget are indistinguishable now from dozens of others in my memory. But that soft rattle against rice paper, a small pale form turned suddenly into a figure of menace: that I can recall as clear as day. Ga!
Shortcut through the fields—
a brush of wings against
my moonlit face.
A few feet from the busy highway, next to the Advance Auto Parts store on the outskirts of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, two carloads of wildflower enthusiasts piled out and feasted their eyes on bloodroot, Dutchman’s-breeches, and the first purple trillium.
It might seem strange that so many delicate-seeming native perennials would flourish in what we like to think of waste places. But steep, rocky hillsides along roads and highways are among the few places where the over-abundant white-tailed deer don’t linger. Trash-strewn, noisy, polluted, and excessively vulnerable to weedy invasives though they may be, such places have become de facto wildflower preserves. You can walk for miles through the deer-haunted back-of-beyond and see little but brown from last year’s hayscented fern.
In a poem by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton, the “Outskirts” are “an intermediate place, stalemate, neither city nor country,” and include “auto body repair shops in former barns.”
The stones throw their shadows abruptly like objects on the surface of the moon.
And these places just multiply.
Like what they bought with Judas’s money: “the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.”
But any place where trees are allowed to sprout and grow however they want, free from overzealous homeowners and unchecked herds of grazing animals alike, still offers the possibility of a sabbath — the return of balance to the earth’s economy. Profit and toil have not yet completely wrested it from the shyer and more indigent inhabitants of the earth. It still has the capacity to give more than it receives.
The land bought with blood money in Matthew 27:6-8, or fertilized with blood according to Acts 1:18-20, became a kind of sanctuary too. What had been an economically exploited piece of ground — a source of potter’s clay — was converted into a refuge, with the author of Acts quoting from Psalms: Let no man dwell therein… In similar fashion, the best display we wildflower hunters found last Saturday was a few miles farther to the southeast along the same highway, at the base of what had once been a very active quarry for ganister stone: the Thousand Steps, now publicly owned and managed as a Pennsylvania state gameland. The mountainside has recovered remarkably well in just a few decades, and indeed, now serves as a refuge for a state-threatened species, the Allegheny woodrat. On a beautiful, warm spring day, the parking area along the highway was crowded with visitors intent on climbing the eponymous steps and taking in the view from the top. We seemed to be the only ones there to peer at the ground.
After the long winter,
the flowers too are eager
to face the sun.
*
A lull in traffic.
The wildflowers grow still
on their thin stalks.
*
View the complete slideshow from Saturday’s outing, or (for those with slower connections) browse the photoset.
First warm day.
I sit in the shade closing one eye
then the other.
*
This phoebeing—
even the pants on the line
seem to get the rhythm.
*
Vicious groundhog fight.
The victor stands still & lets the flies
land on his face.
*
Fur in the air—
the cattails
are shedding.
*
As slow as spring
on the half-naked dead elm,
a fox squirrel’s tail.
*
The vulture’s shadow
travels four times farther—
up & down each tree.
*
This morning
in its vase on the table,
the forsythia bloomed.
This is the weblog of Dave Bonta, a poet, editor, and shutterbug from the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. For background on the site, see the About page. For more about me, see my Google profile.
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"On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
— Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.
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