Eclipse ashes smudge the air
The four no longer breathe.
The earth is a sucking wound.
The earth is bud and bone.
What once was green is red.
What once was dead, aether.
Some still say they are four.
I tell you there are but three.
Lady Cobweb inclines her head —
A ganglion dangles from a slot.
She checks her own pulse — blood
Beats like tines on a crosscut saw,
Always anything but a waltz,
Erratic, and nobody's fault.
I found this in pencil on the inside back cover of my ageless copy of Salinger's Franny and Zooey, which I've had since I was in my teens. There were several drafts. If you've read the book, you'll know there's a lot of Zen in it, which must have spurred me to write this haiku.
A broken pebble —
Sand and mountain together,
Also permanent.
One
Some think trees know each other
As an unborn child knows its mother —
Receptivities to stasis and change
Continually rearrange
The molecules of a form of mind
As they perpetually unwind.
“Some think” has become all
That’s left of the old universal.
Two
We can’t tell anyone to know,
Don’t even know what knowing is,
Where it comes from, its genesis.
Things we know just come and go.
We can’t force anything to stay,
Especially anything we say.
Everything we know is “as though,”
A nothing become contingent,
Mindlessly intelligent.
There’s no bird smarter than a crow,
Or so it’s said by learned men,
Who can count from one to ten,
But find it hard to explain how
Crows never fly in a straight line.
As if seeking some strict design,
We fly from not wanting to know.
Temptation does not walk on legs
As long and thin as giraffe stilts.
It stomps like an elephant on eggs
Until it's churned a mess of guilt.
All the old men are full of denial,
As if that's all it took to be godly.
The Office is an empty trial
And determination works, oddly,
Better than love, if all you want
Is to know physical love, riches,
Hatred — sick powers of the tyrant.
I love how the hair shirt itches.
Haiku, 9/9/26
I think each wave is
New — unlike any other —
But I’m not a wave.
Haiku, 9/10/26
The lake horizon
Is a perfectly straight line —
It closes my eyes.
Haiku, 9/11/26
I watch the lake shore
Through bare trees and square windows —
Water floods the house.
Haiku, 9/12/26
The wind’s strong today —
Gull flotillas ride the waves —
Vanish between them.
Haiku 2, 9/12/26
There’s no more to say
About our time on the beach —
The sand says, “Go home.”
And from September 19, 2022
All gray and white, gulls,
Lake, and clouds. The banished sun
Slashed the horizon.
