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 literal 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 interpretation. 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)
My window is blocked by
an enormous vinyl
advertisement
for a red
cocktail dress.
If you’re looking up
from the street,
I am right behind
the left breast,
shameless as a blood fluke.
When the sun strikes it
at 3:00 in the afternoon,
the room fills
with evening
& I raise the window
to listen to it
crackle & hum.
Prompted by this photo, which was also the image used for Read Write Poem’s first ecard contest.
That first sacrament’s
cratered snow was already
turning brown
while they marvelled
at its tartness, the luster
& tight fit of its skin,
its curved descent to orifice.
Then oh the aftertaste —
like wood, like clay.
In the house of night, a blue bear
pores over the screenplay for your dreams.
Somebody’s bad heart wrinkles
like a sack of cheese tied to the rafters.
I dreamed that I was lucid-dreaming,
and then I was.
In the house of night, neither ink
nor midnight oil ever run low.
Bed-time prayers flutter out
through a cross-shaped window,
anachronistic as bats on a winter day.
The mild poison from a house spider bite
spreads a dark delta down one thigh.
In the house of night, every time
a clock stops, some unloved language
or species dies in its sleep.
A nightjar blows its lid
& the bogeyman jumps, an obvious fraud,
under the parchment eaves.
I got some half-decent footage of crows mobbing what turned out to be a red-tailed hawk this afternoon. I wasn’t quick enough to get the hawk, so it didn’t make for much of a nature video even by my low standards, so I decided I’d mess around with it and try to make a videopoem instead. Here’s the text:
If the dead can’t rest,
it’s because we won’t let them.
We storm,
we harry,
we decry,
we implore.
We make them star
in our horror shows
for that surge of adrenalin
that lets us know
we’re alive —
as if they our dear departed
were the ones out for blood.
Jamendo.com was down, so I went to the Internet Archive’s Open Source Audio collection instead and quickly found some suitable music. The main advantage of searching on Jamendo is that you can filter out Creative Commons licenses that specify “no derivatives.” But I think from now on I’ll probably try the Internet Archive first, because it seems to have much more of the kind of music I’m looking for.
*
For what it’s worth, this is my 3,000th post at Via Negativa. Granted, 466 of those are just quote-and-link posts in the Smorgasblog category. And this figure does not include the 719 Morning Porch posts, which are in a separate blog. I mention them because, in my first several years of blogging, I almost certainly would’ve included them as part of the Via Negativa stream — and someday when I stop keeping the Morning Porch record, I will probably import all those posts into the VN archives.
As luck would have it, we just passed another milestone a week ago: the 12,000th approved comment, which was left by Dana Guthrie Martin. That excludes the several thousand comments that were lost when Via Negativa moved to WordPress on April Fool’s Day, 2006. And just to keep things in perspective: I’ve logged 1,118,233 spam comments during that same period.
the holes were made in a living person
whose prosthetic left leg was hidden
wounded men who returned to Iraq
women in elaborate headdress
weapons at their side
crush skulls flat as pancakes
a more grisly interpretation
driven into their heads
to help achieve psychological closure
they all walked under their own power
bodies were arranged neatly
five amputees and one blinded soldier
their night terrors stopped after they went
by blunt-force trauma
the amount of developmental growth and closure was phenomenal
two round holes in the soldier’s cranium
as if they were old friends
it was a trade-off
elite burials
where they were maimed
to honor fallen comrades
soldiers have often returned to old battlefields
treated with a compound of mercury
brittle bones of a person long dead would shatter like glass
some victims had been heated, baked not burned
clapped on their backs and welcomed
to exorcise persistent demons
Ur is protected within the perimeter of an air base
places many of them left while unconscious or in agony
the biggest thing in the world is the silence
we’re getting ready to turn off the lights
wear your wounds like badges
not dosed with poison
a war is still in progress
it’s almost like mass murder and hard for us to understand
the overburden of earth
*
All lines above, including the title, were taken verbatim from the following two news stories:
The security cameras only catch
one side of the story. Notice how they stick
at the 38-second mark, keep me standing
still as a parking meter for long seconds
only to skip
faster than light to the far wall
& its chorus line of coolers.
Just because you’re looking down
doesn’t make you omniscient.
What appears to the straight-laced
like a shopping trip gone awry
was really a pas de deux
with some wild weather.
True, I am loose as a flag
flailing around its pole,
buffeted by winds you barely feel.
But drinking is an escape into the open.
I round an aisle or pull on a door handle
& the cross-wind catches me;
I try to walk like a sober person & I go down.
And there on my fundament
I begin again,
exploring the deep
contingencies of consciousness
with all four limbs at once,
supple as a newborn.
Luck — as the madman
of Chu told Confucius —
is lighter than a feather,
but no one knows how to bear its weight.
Be it a 12-pack or a bowl of candy,
as long as I cling I’m anchored
to the spot.
But in the end, in the part that got cut
from all your amusing remixes,
when I let go & just sit for a minute,
my body remembers on its own
how to evade the world’s
persistent embrace
& I rise & walk.
A video adaptation of a poem I wrote back in 2006 and included in my online collection Shadow Cabinet.
This videopoem idea has been brewing for a while. I finally got a chance to shoot the contrail footage last week, on one of those days when some of the contrails remain and others quickly fade, depending I suppose on the elevation of the jet. As usual, though, the most time-consuming part of the video-making process was finding the right music. The wordless, a capella song is by a Belgian electronica band called Silence, who are generous enough to copyleft all their material. The track happened to be just the right length, so I didn’t have to alter it in any way.
