November 4, 2023

Marsh Muirhead

ALCOHOL, TOBACCO, AND FIREARMS

Haibun

The blued barrels of the shotguns stuck out over the hood of the station wagon, pointing away from the men who were smoking, the smoke rising in the breeze, drifting into the corn field. The corn stalks rustled in the breeze. Two pheasants lay on the roof of the station wagon. The dogs were somewhere out in the corn, looking for the other downed birds. The men shared a bottle in a brown paper bag and waited for the dogs.

jokes about women
the scent of whisky
on every word

from Rattle #47, Spring 2015
Tribute to Japanese Forms

__________

Marsh Muirhead: “Haiku and haibun are a great place to store and flex the notions and images that come to us all the time and everywhere. They are sometimes starts to longer pieces, or as finished writing they serve as a kind of journaling, whether as fact or fiction, about our own lives or others we imagine.”

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November 3, 2021

Srinivas Mandavilli

RAIN

We lay together on a charpoy, the thrum on asbestos roofs ending all days. The downpour cantillates like Sanskrit chanting we had heard at Kamakhya temple, the one in the drenched valley of leechee and guava trees. As we gathered by Dikhow’s shore, the river gravid with mud, branches and massive trunks flowed with a ferocity towards a cantilever bridge. Brahmaputra becomes a sea every monsoon, never settling, inundating all the elephant grass which our mahout carefully holds back on our rides. Today we wander into another summer on Lakshman Jhula where the Ganges turns green, tourists run to small motels to escape the drizzle. Some things do not change—the small delight of sitting on a railway platform savoring chana dal fritters by wet train tracks with steaming cardamom tea in clay cups. There is a storm expected, already the smell of rain mouses its way in like the time you cried after your mother’s passing, the sky was splayed by Indra’s bow. There was so much dampness the night your water broke, as we ran from the laundromat with a newspaper over our heads, the car’s floor mats also soaked from a leaking heater core. And this is how I know you, on an outrigger listening to a whale song in a drizzle, breeze coursing on your face, not joyless but not joyous for anything and in its swells  

flood waters pour in 
a thought that the world might change 
once or not at all

from Rattle #73, Fall 2021
Tribute to Indian Poets

__________

Srinivas Mandavilli: “My first experience of writing poetry in English was during high school years in India and for that I will forever be indebted to Sr. Helen Mary, an English teacher in a small dusty town in Western India. Several years later, in the U.S., I found myself returning to writing and many poems seem to stem from memories of childhood spent with family, or around food and travel. Such memories seem to emerge from revisiting India as an adult and a tourist, but also from the distance created by living in the U.S.”

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June 18, 2015

Jack Vian

MUSASHI-SAN

Haibun

Who are the ones who awake without hearing
the sound of the sun-filled
clouds
dancing upon the edges of an outstretched wing?

And who am I?

To stand alone like a swordsman
without his sword,

a mere figure
in the unresolved distance
like a brushstroke

awaiting a scroll—

an empty bowl
ungrateful for the pleasure
of its emptiness

from Rattle #47, Spring 2015
Tribute to Japanese Forms
2016 Neil Postman Award Winner

__________

Jack Vian: “For the incarcerated poet, a poem is more than just a literary construct, it is an ideal given flesh. It’s the difference in wishing that a passing plane will notice the ship-wrecked castaways, and taking the time to carve an SOS in the beach or put a message in a bottle. So I’m always thankful when readers find something worthwhile in my experience. The only Japanese form that I use regularly is the haiku, and my practice of that had fallen into arrears. But I wrote this highly versified almost-haibun while reading a biography of Miyamoto Musashi.”

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June 15, 2015

Kenny Tanemura

BASHO’S HUT: A HAIBUN

I asked people at souvenir shops, bakeries, at Circle Ks for directions to Konpukuji Temple, but no one had heard of it, and they could only give me vague directions after I circled the temple on the map. I was surprised because the temple was in their neighborhood, and Japan’s greatest poet, Matsuo Basho, had lived there, and written one of his most famous haiku:

Even in Kyoto
hearing the cuckoo’s cry
I long for Kyoto

I decided to write my own haiku in response:

Dusk falling in Kyoto
I long for the freshness
of morning in Kyoto

By the time we’d reached Konpukuji Temple, we were soaked in sweat and rain and frustration. Finally, after we found ourselves passing the Kyoto University of Art & Design, a super-stylish campus—we were wandering uphill through residential neighborhoods. We usually don’t approach local Japanese who aren’t working in some capacity, but upon seeing a man walking in the rain with two small boys, I couldn’t help calling out “Sumimasen.” Luckily the man stopped and said that he would take us to the temple. Evidently one of the small boys was visiting from America and knew English. He wanted the boy to practice English with us, but like many Japanese children, he was too shy. The man asked the boy to ask us where we are from, but the boy shook his rain-soaked head and said no.

We walked up a flight of stone stairs in the middle of a residential neighborhood and found the temple we would never have found without the kind help of the stranger. An old man sat behind a counter, looking surprised to see us. It was raining out, and late for Kyoto, about 4 p.m. A lot of things close around 5 p.m. in Kyoto.

I was surprised to find out that Yosa Buson’s grave was also on the property. It seemed fitting that Buson, as Japan’s second greatest haiku poet, should have his grave in the yard of Basho’s house, since Basho is generally regarded as Japan’s greatest poet.

Sitting on the tatami in the hut where Basho lived and wrote haiku hundreds of years ago, I felt humbled. I couldn’t read anything in the little museum down the hill from the hut, no scrolls or signs, but it was magical nonetheless. I wanted to stay there for the rest of the evening and write haiku about the summer rain. Few things inspired me in Japan, not my visit to long-lost relatives in Taga, not my travels through Tokyo and Yokohama, but Basho’s old hut was inspiring for me. I dashed off seven haiku:

Footsteps
the sound of rain …
pages turning

Another visitor come
to visit Basho’s hut …
garden stillness

Basho your
neighbors don’t know you—
summer rain

Summer rain
falls into the well
Basho drank from

Kyoshi wrote poems
of the view from here—
today clouds, rain …

In Basho’s hut
don’t want to move
an inch

Stretch my aching
legs in Basho’s hut—
already at home!

I had visited the Keats Shelley House in Rome last summer, but my experience of wandering around the house where Keats spent his last days, while stunning, doesn’t compare to my experience of sitting in Basho’s thatched hut. His haiku made such a deep impression on me as a teenager when my parents took me to Tokyo’s Maruzen Bookstore and I bought a handful of translations of Basho’s poetry. I didn’t care about the trend of the moment that was being sported on the streets of the Ginza, I just cared about the essences that Basho captured so well. These days, I’ve gone far from my youthful idealization of essences and more toward the trivia of the moment. I want to return again to my deep, if lost, love for the core of things that Basho was always aiming for, both in his life and poetry.

Buson also influenced me greatly. In front of Buson’s grave, I put my hands together in the rain, closed my eyes and bowed. I remembered one of my favorite haiku by Buson:

I leave,
you stay—
two autumns

I used to wonder at the meaning of this poem. Were there two autumns because each individual had a different experience of autumn? Or was autumn doubly autumnal—solemn and lonely, because the other had gone? Of course autumn in Japan is famously beautiful, a time of leaves turning color. So was this poem then an ode to autumn’s beauty? Or is autumn personified here—the “you” is not a friend but autumn itself. When autumn leaves and turns to winter, Buson is left to grieve the loss of this beautiful season. But what about “two autumns?” Doesn’t that suggest that Buson himself is autumn? Is it possible for the autumn in autumn to leave and the autumn in Buson to stay autumnal despite autumn being over? He carries the season he loves within him. This doesn’t seem improbable for a Japanese poet who loved few things more than seasons and their various characteristics and changes. I left a poem for Buson:

Basho
Buson fixed up your hut
found in ruin

from Rattle #47, Spring 2015
Tribute to Japanese Forms

__________

Kenny Tanemura: “I became interested in Japanese poetry through J.D. Salinger’s stories. On a trip to Tokyo shortly after graduating from high-school, I visited the Maruzen bookstore in the Ginza and took home as many translations of Japanese poetry as were available, an armful.”

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June 9, 2015

Marsh Muirhead

WILLOWS ON THE CROW

Haibun

The willows whipped us along the banks of the Crow River, the wind-driven lashings hustling us along on our cobbled raft between mucky dunes, over carp shadows, boulders whose slimy beards danced in waters stenched by the adhesive plant miles upriver. She and I were Tarzan and Jane, pirate and captive, boss and slave, poling deeper into the jungle, discussing her fate—flogging, short rations, thrown overboard. Later, we drifted in the sun on our backs.

the scent
of her wet swimsuit
after we took it off

from Rattle #47, Spring 2015
Tribute to Japanese Forms

__________

Marsh Muirhead: “Haiku and haibun are a great place to store and flex the notions and images that come to us all the time and everywhere. They are sometimes starts to longer pieces, or as finished writing they serve as a kind of journaling, whether as fact or fiction, about our own lives or others we imagine.”

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May 4, 2015

Roberta Beary

GENETICS

Haibun

Your eyes are big and round like your father’s

but while his are the color of the Irish Sea

yours are the color of the muddy fields

on my father’s land

fit only for the peasants who worked them.

abortion day
a shadow flutters
the fish tank

from Rattle #47, Spring 2015
Tribute to Japanese Forms

[download audio]

__________

Roberta Beary: “Exiled to Tokyo in the 1990s, I morphed into ‘wife of’ in Japan. I tried to fit in and not lose myself in the process. But it wasn’t working. I was slowly disappearing. Then I found haiku. And lost my husband. But that’s another story.” (website)

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