Pieces of Lost Conversations

Last post, I mentioned that the haiku genre is conversational both in practice and in its origins, emerging from a tradition, among the literati of Medieval Japan, of writing sequences of short poems over the course of hours or years. And I mentioned as well that this theme would be taken up in a future post, so this seems a good time to note that several of the pieces in this collection are simply my side of conversations held from 2015 and into 2016 with my dear friend Gisèle Lundrigan, emerging from a handful of mead soaked evenings during which the two of us traded words both spoken and written. I've lost the coloured cue cards on which the first versions were scribbled, and my record keeping sucks, but while I no longer recall the exact pieces for which this description holds, somewhere in this mess are echoes of those lost verbal jam sessions.

As for today's sample, these six pieces are from the Summer section of the seasonal sequence. While most are haiku, one is a haibun, a form developed by Basho, generally considered to be the greatest haiku poet in the tradition. The haibun is essentially a short prose piece with a haiku attached, and Basho wrote a number of haibun collections based on his travels around Japan. The form itself owes much to his close engagement with Chuang Tzu, the early Taoist thinker whose short philosophic tales and parables seem to constitute the beginning of Chinese literary prose.

From 'Part One: Within Seasons: Summer'

gap between old boots

long stare to rushing water

vertigo's soft pull

wild rose startled

pink a brain's response to light—

no one sees the rose

jack pine on a ledge

undercut by years of waves

appears motionless

three days and the wasp

has not moved from my window:

the cleaning can wait

A haibun for Captain Jack Gunn:

Uncle Jack navigated bombers over Germany for the RAF. At 30, he was the oldest one in his crew. The men called him Pops. He never talked about it in front of me. In fact, he rarely spoke, though I remember him smiling from the door as my cousin Kris and I played on the bench swing in his back yard. Mostly, I remember him sitting by a window, sipping rye and water:

Lancaster bomber

on a concrete pedestal—

bright hybrid roses

(Jackson Park, Windsor)

chimneys in tall grass

do not remember salt cod

or call for lost eyes

(abandoned village, Newfoundland)