Entry 52 — Some Conventional Haiku
Today’s entry is a repeat of one from Christmas day, 2005, with a few comments from today at the end of it:
25 December 2005: “clenched sky.” That’s one of the scraps in the notebook yesterday’s entry was about. Circa 1983. Never got into any poem of mine but may yet. Another scrap is the start in fading cursive of a sonnet I completed somewhere else on Dylan Thomas. I was momentarily quite taken by what the word, “steepled” did to its fifth line, “by his construction of a steepled truth,” for it took a while for me to realize the word was not “stupid.”
Other highlights include the following five unpublished haiku:
rain now as loud
against the northern side of the house
as the roof
rotting log
only part of forest floor
to show through melting snow
glimpsed tanned shoulder;
thin white string across it,
tied like a shoelace
bikini-bar dancer
showing off to her boy-friend,
me in between them
far enough from the storm
nearing the color-dotted beach
to see above it
I wrote these about the time I pretty much stopped writing conventional haiku. I quite like the storm one, probably because I still vividly remember the first Florida storm I saw from far enough away to see above–and to both sides–of it. I don’t think it’s a truly outstanding haiku, though. The one about the bikini dancer is fair in the wry sardonicism vein, I think. The one about the bikini string is nearly not a haiku, for it doesn’t really provide any haiku contrast; i.e., it’s a single-image description. On second thought, maybe it’s excitement versus the mundane: girl in bikini versus shoelace.
I dunno. The other two are very standard, but I’ve tried to improve them,anyway:
the rain now louder
against the house’s north side
than on the roof
rotting log:
only portion of the forest floor
to show through the snow
The first is slightly haikuish in the way it obliquely discusses a wind; the second re-uses a very over-done haiku theme, to wit: life goes on, or–more specifically–winter snow won’t win; but the theme is slightly warped toward freshness with the use of something a reader will take to represent a cohort of winter rather than a counter to it, until he realizes the cause of rotting.
Also in the notebook this bit of High Sagacity: “The Eastern Wise Man attempts to reduce his awareness to the size of his experience; the Western Wise Man attempts to increase the size of his experience to the size of his awareness.” Yep, I’ve always been Eurochauvinistic.
From today:
rotting log;
nothing else of the forest floor
showing through the snow.
Tags: haiku