nameabledays Archive One

Parts of the week I spend on a part-time job that pays modestly but affords me generous moments of communion with nature. I step out for a smoke from the office, after a bout with the computer tapping out somebody else’s speech or a slogan or a press release. Before me is a pond straight out of Basho. Around it are the park’s lush vegetation and clumps and clumps of bamboo. The pond stretches out to the near horizon where beyond the treetops the tips of city can be seen: the skeleton of an unfinished building, the latticework of a radio tower, the spindly, lopsided arm of a construction crane. The pond may be crystal clear or murky or shimmering depending on the weather or time of day. I smoke silently or share the silence with a colleague, or he breaks it with shoptalk reminding me that for him, this precious scene is part of every day. I linger before going back to slogans because there is a poem here somewhere. And I take some notes on a little notebook.

Not a Haiku

Bamboo are creaking.
Leaf ripples the sun
On lagoon.Words are an excess
In this haiku afternoon.

That was this afternoon. Tonight under the incandescent brightness of a lamp, on a dining table I have appropriated as my writing desk, I am adding and snipping and restoring and again snipping away lines. And counting syllables. Five. Seven. Five. English, or perhaps any other language, is a bother, when the form is Japanese. I think of a solitary monk walking from a monastery hidden among the slopes of paint-brush mountains…Ah, to have one thought, one image, one particle of memory in the few strokes of a brush…

Almost a Haiku

Bamboo sway dripping.
Sun on lake breaks the grey
Sky of the monsoon.

Thunder rumbles somewhere. It is now pouring. Outside my closed window I can imagine the rain slanting across the funnel light of a lamppost. The light creates a circle on the sidewalk. But lamppost lights, with the advent of mercury or xenon, are no longer like that. It is a memory borrowed from a book or a movie. Which image, borrowed or no, of course I can’t see because my window is closed. The whirr of the electric fan on the floor drowns in the hissing and rattling of the rain. I know it is whirring because it did before the sound was drowned by the rain. I wonder what the pond looks like in this weather. But it is night and there is no poet there. And it is storming. No moon to shimmer or shatter on the water. Are the bamboo there? Or, before the storm, was a frog jumping? In my memory it is daylight. I can see it. I am there. And I snip and restore and snip away my lines and syllables again.

Perhaps a Haiku

Bamboo leaf spinning,
Ripples the sun on lagoon.
Words are an excess.

I rest my pen. But it is not a pen. It is a keyboard. And a mouse. I click, I save. I light a cigarette.

September 7, 2006