Dru Philippou: Counterpoise

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oriental boxes of sesame seeds, wild rice, and mung beans

behind the glass of wall-to-wall red lacquer cabinets

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with Chinese red, minor accents are crucial

a bottle of yellow-green olive oil

............on the black marble countertop

a set of red pearl ginger jars subdued in a corner

a stainless steel stove reflects the random arrangement of lemons

............on the long oak table

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the kitchen window

which takes up the entire south wall

............pulls the warm interior

to the cool exterior

of ocean blue

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........................wave after wave

........................on his surfboard

........................a boy

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by Dru Philippou

Taos, New Mexico

Bob Lucky: On a Journey

door open door closed no door wherever I am says Kabir an entry point but I can’t get a handle on it turning this way turning that until turning becomes a circle the circle a trap the trap a door always open always closed

broken clouds
my head against
the bus window

by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Roger Jones: Old Man

Dad had taken me to have my hair cut short. “He keeps trying to look like a Beatle,” he told the chuckling barber.

Afterwards, in the car, I hid my head under a baseball cap.

Backing out of the slot, Dad slammed his brakes. My cap flew off. A long-haired teenager wheeling past behind him on a bike screamed, “Watch where you’re goin’, old man!”

"Old man?" -- I'd never thought of my father as old.

Forty years ago, and Dad a decade younger than I am now.

day after day
wheeling by—
this same blue sky

by Roger Jones
New Braunfels, Texas
first pubished in Frogpond 29:3 (Autumn 2006)

Ruth Holzer: Bitche

The citadel dominates the town, now as in years past, giving the appearance of protection, if not the reality. The town’s a stony place, catering to soldiers. I came to know several families there. During the war they had fled to Provence, where the Italian occupation forces helped them hide and survive. When they returned, they had to go from house to house to retrieve their furniture from the neighbors.

ghosts in the hills—
swift night descends again
upon Lorraine

by Ruth Holzer
Herndon, Virginia

Garry Eaton: Roach

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Occasionally, one will launch across an open space, and bury itself in a crack or crevice. Quicker than the eye can see. Almost. But I sense them there, all around me, in their ugly millions.

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infiltrated and resigned

in the great cities

the porous suburbs

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Though getting rid of them is hopeless, once in awhile I make a sweep of the neighborhoods, taking down numbers. In a dishwasher's apron that once was white, I get to my knees on the duckboard, and peer under the food prep tables, under the grill, the fridges, the salad bar, and beyond, into the hellish, inaccessible spaces where greasy splatters and half-cooked bits of meat tend to fall when things get hot and heavy in the kitchen. And yes, I can see them there, another population explosion, breeding like cockroaches! However, I am in control here. This extermination will proceed my way, safely and efficiently.

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I cover all the food trays, dishes, steel tables, grills and sinks. I close the cupboards, clear the runways, turn on the fans, break out the spray bombs, and don the death mask. Hardened by experience, I get down quickly to this necessary and inevitable destruction, and before you can say 'Hank Greenburg,' I have overwhelmed the favorite haunts, dare I say the ghettos, of my enemies with a devastating blitz.

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the fog of war

no telltale press, no monuments

to the battle

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At first, they are slow to respond. The weaponized mist spreads unnoticed, while I wait. Some of the largest and apparently strongest are the first to suffer—survivors of past holocausts, I theorize, and weakened, or with an acquired sensitivity. First, they quiver all over, and go rigid for a moment. As the lethal rain continues, nervous systems begin to relay strange messages. Then a shivering chaos vibrates up through ganglia to the insect brain and hence to the extremities. It's like watching plague and hunger strike a beseiged city. One after another, the inmates commence their dance, flipping themselves over and over, wildly out of control and running amok. The little ones stop, seeming to watch in amazement, as the fanatical possession spreads to them as well. Soon it shakes everyone, inducing waves of fear and a simultaneous scramble for the exits, lest their wills, too, fail and are paralyzed by this weakness, this whirling obsession. Panicked, and breathing deeply, they suck in their proper bane, as I move in for the kill.

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Jewish Avenger

Spider Man of the garbage can—

his deadly dew

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Most of them escape, but the kill rate is satisfactory. I know, because I've done this before, and every time my impact improves. I ease the pressure slowly to short, reinforcing squirts. I don't need to watch until every wriggle has ceased, either. I can imagine it. Beyond reach, cockroach corpses clog cockroach streets, cockroach subways and apartments. They crowd cockroach windows and doors, lying where they died in a final bid for cockroach freedom. But dried and blackened, in a few days they all will fall to dust, and disappear. Whither, I do not know.

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I open the doors to the restaurant to air the place out, and in an hour, I remove the CLOSED sign from the window, and again invite in the world. Our little corner is safe once more.

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today's special

chicken soup with lox

and a bagel

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by Garry Eaton

Port Moody, British Columbia

Jeffrey Winke: Keeps Hammering the Dull

He tries to kill the flies before most customers arrive. You can hear the thwack, thwack, thwack as he chases a slow-moving fat one that’s on a late autumn suicide mission. The stupid thing keeps hammering the dull, grimy windowpane hell-bent on achieving a deadly concussion before a thwack will splat the life out of it. The bartender clearly isn’t a Buddhist. The broken window pane will never get fixed, because it’s way too big a deal to dismantle the window frame in order to get a clear shot at the pane. The bartender chuckles at his cleverness when he thinks: What a pain this pane would be to fix.

good-ol’-boy bar—
I mess with them,
order a chardonnay

.

..
by Jeffrey Winke
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Bob Lucky: Bake Sale

The campus is thick with mothers and nannies laden with cupcakes, chocolate chip cookies and cinnamon rolls. Across the quad a woman sees me sitting on a bench, with my hands beneath my legs to keep them warm. She slows her pace, stops, then turns and heads towards me. We make eye contact when she is about thirty feet away. I watch the look of recognition dissolve as she gets closer.

“Oh, it’s not you.”

“But it is,” I reply.
.

an awkward silence
leaves change color
and blow away
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by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Announcement: Publication of Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose 1—Summer 2009

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MET Press is pleased to announce the publication of a new journal. The premiere issue of the biannual journal, Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose, edited by Jeffrey Woodward, has been published in print, in PDF ebook, and in an online digital edition. This Summer 2009 issue is 184 pages in a trade paperback. ISSN 1947-606X.

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Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose, with this inaugural issue, establishes itself as the first and only periodical devoted exclusively to these two mixed prose-and-verse genres. Haibun and tanka prose belong to the ancient and venerable tradition of Japanese poetry and belles-lettres. Their practice has waned in modern Japan but, with the continuing popularity of their respective parent-forms, haiku and tanka, in the West, haibun and tanka prose are experiencing unprecedented growth and diverse experimentation from New York to London, from Berlin to Brisbane, and in small towns and open countryside around the globe. Haibun and tanka prose are busily revising the general literary map and, in doing so, quietly reforming haiku and tanka also. Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose, a biannual journal, faithfully represents the full range of styles and themes adopted by contemporary practitioners and intends to play a vanguard role in charting the rapid evolution of these genres.

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Check out Modern Haibun & Tanka Prose at http://www.themetpress.com/modernhaibunandtankaprose/masthead.html

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For more information, contact the editor, Jeffrey Woodward, at MHTP.EDITOR@GMAIL.COM

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Review of Ken Jones' STONE LEEKS

Stone Leeks: More Haiku Stories by Ken Jones. (Pilgrim Press, Troedrhiwsebon, Cwmrheidol, Aberystwyth, SY23 3 NB, Wales. 2009). 96 pp. ISBN 978-0-9539901-6-0. Price: 6 pounds 50

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Reviewed by Patricia Prime

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Stone Leeks is typical Ken Jones. All these haibun follow the same path which his writing has followed in a long and distinguished career. Often reading these haibun I paused to reflect on the way these poems seem older, richer, more resigned versions of the same sort of haibun all the way from those of Pilgrim Foxes (2001, a volume shared with Jim Norton and Sean O’Conner), Arrow of Stones (2002), Stallion’s Crag (2003) and The Parsley Bed (2006).

There may be a little disappointment that there is no late flight of greatness in his writing, as he is perhaps one of the best practioners of haibun, if elegance and observation are criteria enough. We aren’t confronted with anything of strangeness or genius, but with a wry and beautiful understanding of the British countryside, and indeed, of human life.

This is not to say there is no development, or improvement. The collection contains five sections of 28 haibun on the themes of nature, absurdities, war, love and the inevitable winding down of life. Each section of haibun is interspersed with 59 free standing haiku.

The first haibun “Goodman’s Wood” is a fine story about an older, wiser narrator looking back on the woods where once lead mining took place:

Two hundred years ago there was some lead mining here—a truly hellish, poisoning occupation.

Spoil heap stained red
split needles
of the crooked pine

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Now the writer is in the area felling old trees. Here Jones unselfconsciously lets his talent for description render the scene. Like his other penchant, that of sage commentary, this seems slightly incongruous, but it is so much part of his style that we come to accept it.

“Let Me Be” is a slice-of-life story where, upon entering primeval woodland, Jones encounters a woman:

And then, I see here. She is climbing the crag ahead up a steep deer track, agile and sure-footed. Fawn shirt and matching slacks, brown shoulder length hair, and—decidedly odd—not even a day sac. To catch her up I climb the bare rock over to the left—a granite boiler plate, sticking to my boots, clinging to my fingers.

The concluding paragraph gives a sympathetic description of the woman’s disfigured face as she lopes away across a field.

In the second section, “Theatre of the Absurd,” I enjoyed “Seat 16,” where the subject is given a brief, transformative insight that transcends the world of travel:

Nonchalantly I explore my own coach and the adjacent ones. Mine alone has four more seat numbers than any other, yet carries the same number of seats. Ah, the ticket collector! He just shrugs: L’actualite, monsieur, souvent c’est bizarre. At this, Le Monde Diplomatique is lowered just enough to reveal a goatee beard and an ironic gaze: Soyez stoique, mon brave! He grins.

It is not so much the substance of the story that matters as the way Jones tells it with humour, his occasional use of French words and phrases and the surprising denouement.

In the third section, “War,” Jones’ details are perfect and delicious. Jones writes often of his wartime experiences and in “’We Shall Never Surrender!’” he writes about the local war effort:

All the usual divisions in our local war effort are forgotten. For a start, there’s the Red Dragon which flies in front of the Prince of Wales (again is it Owain Glyndwr or “Mr Windsor”?) and the Union Glad which Parson King flies from his church tower. But not today.

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Peaceful morning
both flags so limp
you can’t tell which

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Mind you, Caradoc ap Rhys, landlord of the Prince of Wales pub, has won one concession. All orders shall be shouted in Welsh, in order to confuse the Germans (and probably half the village).

His use of ordinary people and the vernacular is admirable. With perceptiveness and wisdom, he neatly captures a bygone era.

In “La Liberation,” he and a friend trudge the “ancient pilgrim route from Winchester cathedral to Mont Saint-Michel.” This story is maybe a response to those who see Jones as a “provincial”: someone who only describes or appreciates his own country of Wales:

Baguettes and camembert in the shade of tombstones. Angoville-au-Plein changed hands three times in three days. Inside its eleventh century church, bloodstained pews and bullet marks. Here Kenneth Moore and Robert Wright, US army medics, tended eighty American and German soldiers—and one French child.

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Army Surplus—
“Shell Wound Dressing”
5 euros

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All Jones’ characters are practically interchangeable: their lives are different but they have a wry, elegiac tone. They remark and draw out rather than criticize. The effect requires a suspension of disbelief but, in the end, you come to accept it as unchangeable, and look for nuances elsewhere.

For example, consider the final sentences of “Belle Époque,” “Untidy Loves” and “Song of the Saws” respectively (from the fourth section, “Love”):

*

And now all over Europe the lights are going out. As a foreign national I depart on the last train.
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August 1914
the porcelain shepherdess
her smile

*

“Oh God, why is life so harsh for some?” I ask. “It’s to teach us to grind our teeth down to the stumps, that’s what it is, laddie”. Barefoot stubs out his Woodbine—hard.

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Old book cases
bowed shelves. A tumble
of reeling spines

*

What remains is a mound of sawdust swept in summer sunshine. She has wheeled the last load of firewood into the stable, to be stacked neatly in the stalls of farm horses.

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A long, ripe marriage
drumming logs into the barrow
our fire dance

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We cannot complain about writing this good. Jones wraps up his haibun with an authoritative voice, with a beautiful and complete sentence, followed by a haiku.

The final section, “The Stone Leeks,” is comprised of 10 haibun. One of my favourites is “All’s Right on the Night” about “the strange daytime of theatre,” with its evocations of props, costumes, scenery and the backstage labyrinth of stairs and passageways. A couple of haibun in this section bring the reader up-to-date with Jones’ reminiscences of surgery and the seaside town of Llandudno where the sick and elderly go to take the air and recuperate, as in this excerpt from “Costa Geriatrica”:

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Sun and sky
a bright and breezy
way to go

Here in the sixth century Saint Tudno built his rough stone oratory for ascetic prayer, and gave his name to Llandudno. It is now a genteel resort, where the Grand, the Imperial, the Hydro, the King George and many more stand carefully preserved in pastel stucco.

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“BOOTS” and “OSTLER”
bell pushes
which no longer work

However, the grim trio of sickness, old age and death are still muffled by deep pile carpets and the relentless keeping-up-of appearances

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Expensive and well-cut
how they hang
on these poor wasted clothes horses

The final haibun in this wonderful collection is “The Project”—the author, preparing for his own wake, reminisces about projects he worked on throughout his life and comes to the conclusion—

I laugh at my own funeral oration, so solemnly intoned and recorded when a precocious forty year old. Poking charred diaries. A lifetime of stories told to myself, one as good as another. Knock, knock. Is there anyone there?

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. Old Old summer house
settling out of true
to how it needs to be

Finally, the sending out of invitations to the Graceful Exit Party. From that celebratory wake I alone shall depart sober. And, on the back door, hammer the bottom line of a closed book:

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Winter twilight
cutting timber by the Rheidol
all there is to know

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This is a cunningly contrived, beautifully written and wonderfully readable collection. Not only does it say much about the poet and his roots, but page after page has the type of prose that can only be written by somebody who knows exactly what effects he means to create and exactly how to create them. A writer at the top of his form, in other words.

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by Patricia Prime
Auckland, New Zealand

Jeffrey Woodward: NEBRASKA

a bare tree
and then, again,
the Great Plains

opening before you as if set into place checked and double-checked with a master carpenter’s level so nearly exact as to render literal that old saw about mountain and molehill frost over first light unwinding a never-ending scroll of sky a wind to whittle cloud after cloud away if not the stench of pig trough pig pen another village interrupting the prickly monotony of corn stubble another village with a water tower’s polished introduction and then again corn stubble a patchwork of brown of gray

remembering
its roots in the sky—
a bare tree

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by Jeffrey Woodward

Detroit, Michigan

first published in Frogpond 31:2, Spring/Summer 2008

Bob Lucky: SHIRAZ

I haven’t had a drink in five years, well, not more than a glass here and there, not since my brother died of a cocaine overdose, but I have to say, to say that this bottle, this Shiraz, this is no doubt, doubtlessly the best bottle of wine or whatever I’ve had in a long time.
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two weeks of rain
the faces in the mold
on the café wall

by Bob Lucky
Hangzhou, China

Ruth Holzer: FULTON STREET

I didn’t know anything; I thought if I cooked a hot meal every night, kept our two-room apartment clean and enlivened it with decorative touches—Japanese prints, Indian throw pillows here and there—that he would care for me as in the early days, or at least stay a little bit longer.
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wisps of fog—
breaking up
the joint account

by Ruth Holzer
Herndon, Virginia

Diana Webb: LEPIDOTERISTS

From two fiddles and an accordian, the strains of Mallow Fling as the first thistle seeds drift out towards the folly on the hill. In search of butterflies, we follow the leader along the path where flowers of the wild carrot foam shoulder high as if the sea has parted.

a Comma sighted—
the line of walkers
pauses

He mentions different stategies for survival as experts dart from bushes on one side to grasses on the other. Look here. Look there! Common Browns and Marbled Whites and Silver Washed Fritillaries. With tiny cameras, one crouched above a leaf, one halfway up a slope. 'Enough. No More.' We head back down towards the garden party past Rosebay Willow Herb and Mallow flowers.

dash of citrus—
the longevity
of brimstones

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by Diana Webb
London, England

Review of Diana Webb's TAKEAWAY

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Takeaway – a Collection of Haibun by Diana Webb (Hub Editions, Longholm, East Bank, Wingland, Sutton Bridge, Spalding, Lincolnshire, PE12 9YS, U.K. 2008), 20 x 13 cm. chapbook, ISBN: 978-1-903746-76-9. Available 5.50 pounds.

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Reviewed by Patricia Prime

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Takeaway is a nicely produced small book containing 40 haibun, divided into five sections. Many of the haibun, mostly one per page, consist of one paragraph of prose followed by a single haiku, although there are one or two exceptions. Takeaway is an extremely beautiful explanation of the memories, both cultural and personal, which haunt, yet comprise us. What is most striking is that the haibun seem to draw from the same wardrobe of topics. They show an intensely lived connection to the natural environment and to humanity and deal with personal experience: places (such as a glass tower, museums, cafes and the estuary); people met or remembered (grandmother, an aunt, her father, the pharmacist, friends and a lollipop lady); ruminations on paintings by Van Gogh, Millais, Degas, Monet,Turner and others, and poems that resonate with the sacred—the Pilgrim’s Way, Easter and a Covent Garden church.

The book’s first section “Reminiscence Work” is written from the poet’s point of view as she reminisces about her childhood. In the first haibun, “Ground,” Webb presents a conventional picture of a view from a “twenty first century glass tower”: “At the top of a twenty first century glass tower, views all around and a window as far back as I can see: this 1940’s ‘Children’s Paradise’.” In “not just teddy” Webb writes about what she would save if there was a fire:

If the flat caught fire and I could save only one thing, I would save this bear. He no longer wears the blue and mustard striped jersey my father knitted after the war. His mournful smile absorbs the years, picnics and parties in his honour. Pooled childhoods. Sadness settles on him like dust.

my son types it in,
new e-mail password—
name of the old bear

In the second section, “On Canvas,” Webb reverts to one of her favourite themes: poems about painters and their work, projecting her views in her usual quiet style, as we see in the following haibun:

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Claude Monet—Monochrome
(High tide at Etretat, 1868; The Magpie, 1869)

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Water lilies wait under the weeping willows. Years before . . .

He labours through taste and sting of salt on November gales, the roar and the splash, to anchor an instant.

beyond whisked waves
peak of one dark rock—
man holds his hat down

He sets up his easel in the middle of a white winterscape, becomes part of it. Icicles form in his beard as the moment freezes.

one for sorrow
perched on the gate—
shadows on snow

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As it turns out, the place where Webb really writes in her own voice is in the book’s third section, “Particulars of Place.” In narrative terms, in this section Webb reaffirms her allegiance to the beauty of the English countryside, as we see in the prose section of “A Space":

Vibrant with birdsong, a wooded backdrop. A large oak overhangs, as nettles and grasses partly curtain the small eighteenth century landscape bridge with its central ornamental shell, arched over weed aflit with damselflies . . .

In “Chamber of Commerce,” the fourth section, the haibun are full of precision, music and rhythm. Here is an excerpt from “Surfaces”:

Blue Café—a pigeon swept sky reflected in the glassy table top.

Home—maybe reading . . .

lifting down
the Zen poem book—
a cloud of dust

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Webb’s main strength is her imagery. One of my favourite haibun is “Matinee Idol,” from section five, “Sacred Spaces”:

One by one he lights the candles, opens the book at the appropriate pages, starts to ring the bell. The Covent Garden church, famed for its memorials to people of the theatre, emptied now of tourists.

...................‘For I will consider my cat Jeoffrey’
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at the chancel steps
SILENCE
on four white paws

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This is a successful and poignant image because the haiku reinforces the prose topic, the cat. Many other images in Webb’s haibun are clever, striking and communicative. The haiku are at least as well written as the prose: every word carries weight; every punctuation mark counts; language, meaning and form are interdependent.

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Several of the haibun in the final section, “Crossing Boundaries,” are longer in form. Webb can make a tight image-sequence like “Pinned” work, and is even more successful with a more diffuse haibun like “Time Wasting” which sets up a conversation between the poet as a child and a lay teacher at her convent school. Here and elsewhere in the collection, Webb shows herself simultaneously immersed in the landscape and rituals of English life—school, holidays, shopping, church—and engaged with a wider painterly sphere. Several haibun cite painter’s influences: Van Gogh, Degas, Turner, and Monet, to name a few. A brief haibun from this section is “A Holiday (Edward H Potthast)”:

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Most paintings of such views are one third sea and two thirds sky, but this one fills the canvas almost to the top with damp sand, shallows, waves . . .

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sifting through
a small girl’s fingers
worlds

The haibun at the end of the collection “Connecting” transports us to the persona’s choice of buying beads instead of a book of poems, evoking a level of interest which makes us look back with new eyes on the haibun which make up the rest of the book. Here is an extract from the haibun:

As the small glass spheres slip one by one along the needle into the growing necklace, her reflections drift from by gone generations through parting with a lover to embryos in formation. A tranquility, each moment hovers.

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cobweb strung with mist
across stems of lavender—
span of light years

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Webb gives us poetry which invites us to take our time, return and reread to reflect on its imagery and allusions. Webb is a thoughtful, sensitive and lucid writer; this collection has the depth, breadth and vigour to make us take her seriously. Her haibun are full of warmth, humility and poise. This is a collection to enjoy in moments of solitude and maintains the high standard we have come to expect from the poet.

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by Patricia Prime

Auckland, New Zealand

Marleen Wenneker-Hulst: SUNNYSIDE UP

I am on the ferry to Schiermonnikoog on this warm and bright Sunday morning. Despite the early hour two girls, students I gather, are cheering the crowd on board. Wearing extravagant hats they go jigging and singing along the lower deck. However eyebrows are raised at first, most people appear to enjoy it all the same.

summer wind—
the captain winks
as waves splatter

Later that day, I stop in the village for an ice cream. Across the street, the two girls from the ferry are baking eggs on a tiny gas cooker. “EGG SANDWICH SUNNYSIDE UP—ONLY 1 EURO”, their handwritten sign reads. It is obvious that they are amusing themselves, even though their clientele seems somewhat disappointing. This cannot have anything to do with lack of enthusiasm; their merchandise is being recommended as irresistibly tasty to anyone they see.

Watching those girls doing business in this cheerful manner is catching. It seems though that putting a smile on people’s faces is more rewarding to them than making money. Today anyway.

shovels and buckets
in the baggage rack
beach shuttlebus

by Marleen Wenneker-Hulst
Musselkanaal, the Netherlands

Catherine Mair & Patricia Prime: DESERT CAMP

When my uncle sailed on the Rangitata with the first echelon for Egypt, he left his farm in my parents' care. Their first task was to build a cottage for sharemilkers. Wick and Betty were a fine Maori couple with four children of similar age to us. We used to love going down to the tiny cottage to watch Betty groom her girls' hair. How we admired those bouncy, black ringlets.

in the porch
a milk billy
hung from a nail

The young man wrote home about his experiences of the wartime camp in the Egyptian desert. He described the dirt tracks beside which huts were erected, wells dug, and the transient army camp which grew into a city like no other. He told us the Maadi camp sported cinemas, bars, canteens, chapels, libraries, sports fields, a swimming pool - even an ice cream and meat pie factory.

in his photo
soldiers in 'lemon squeezers'
beside the Sphinx

He wrote in a postcard, "The ramshackle cinema, named Thomas Shafto, near the entrance to the camp, is the first building we see on our return to Maadi from the Western Desert."

veteran's parade . . .
one less companion
to greet

*lemon squeezer—nickname given to the Kiwi soldier's pointed hat.

by Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime
Katikati, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
and Auckland, New Zealand

Richard Straw: PLATO’S CAVE

I meet by chance on the street someone who resembles one of my dead grandpas and who could be the twin brother of Carl Sandburg, who died even longer ago. We walk into his basement apartment, the entrance a trap door. It's either that or a farmhouse cellar—hard to tell in the dream. He tells me his problem—what to do with his many manuscripts, books, papers. I suggest hiring an assistant, someone who won't know or care that he's working for a well-known writer. We talk about Huckleberry Finn, why it's reread, despite its moral dilemmas, to re-create lost innocence.

As I glance at his close-cropped hair, crow's feet, tired but still-bright eyes, the scene shifts to midwinter in Ohio, snow a foot deep, and me standing in the kitchen of my parents' house, my last boyhood home in their small town. Beyond the dinette curtains, five horses, their nostrils steaming, wait on the moonlit driveway, which is cleared of snow. I cry out for dad to see. When I wake, a headache I've had for days is gone.

standing still
the longest time
roller coaster

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by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina
first published in Lynx V23, N1 (February 2008)

Review of Richard Straw's THE LONGEST TIME

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The Longest Time: Haibun by Richard Straw (privately printed: 107 Mont de Sion Drive, Cary, NC 27513, USA. 2009). 21 x 14 cm chapbook, obtainable from the author. $5 US; $8 US abroad (added S&H). Cover photographs are by Marissa Rachel Straw. Other images are from family albums and postcards.

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Reviewed by Patricia Prime

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Richard Straw’s collection of haibun, The Longest Time, is, in its own way, about explorations and discoveries of the self which are as much cerebral and metaphysical as geographical and physical. Mostly, the paths readers are taken along by Straw have origins that are intriguing and transits that are stimulating. Each haibun describes a memory—from childhood growing up in a “walk-up apartment above a soda shop” to the poet making resolutions to himself in the final haibun, “Whether Together or Apart,” before going to sleep:

What was it I told myself last night before going to sleep? Just before the headlights dimmed against the wall, after the last neighbor pulled into the parking lot outside my window, I’d promised myself something that I can’t remember now, even though with three cups of coffee drunk and a fourth one brewing on the hotplate. I haven’t been able to remember anything lately unless I wrote it down.

Straw’s opening line to the succinct haibun “First Impressions” exemplifies the ethos behind this collection. Memory, confrontation, and deconstruction: this is a book laden with possibilities and the permutations and permeations that result from the memories of a lifetime. So often these haibun arise out of an engagement with the personal and the landscape, real but also charged with poetic diction. Take the following prose excerpt from “A Helping Hand”:

And I peer past my ear into the black air register from which, as if quaking in my bedroom on the other side, Fay Wray screams and screams and screams as she’s carried into the jungle by King Kong.

Here the reader’s taken through a landscape that’s at once familiar and yet subjective, a combination that ensures that our view of the recognizable and intimate can become at once estranged and unfamiliar. The entire transformation hinges upon memory—upon whether what is remembered is truthful or a fabrication with a kernel of truth which transforms it.

It’s a battle of words versus memory that’s present in all the haibun. “Sunday Drive” (illustrated by a photo of the poet’s parents) is an evocation of a visit to a relative’s farm:

Our parents take my sister and me to a relative’s farm near Sunbury. The barnyard’s full of running headless chickens and a crazed dog. The farmer uses a tree stump as a chopping block. Much later his son dies James Dean style on graduation night.

empty space
where flower pots were
a wasp returns

“Katallagete,” apart from being indicative of Straw’s delight in playing with recall, assumption, locale and history, personal and collective, also epitomizes an authorial interest in friendship and the poetical exploration of youthful experiences:

Bright spots are rare in this small town, even on Christmas Eve. Earlier tonight, after watching a campy movie in a cold theater, I joined a couple of older friends, Junior and Jesse, to go caroling. Rather than ask them to drop me off at home later, I agreed to chug-a-lug beers at their apartment above Jack’s TV shop. Then, on Junior’s dare, we almost got shot at by Foxy on Senate Street because of something Jesse said to one of Foxy’s girls. We got separated at The Attic after I was pushed down the wide wooden stairs for getting up on the bar with a go-go-dancer.

“Festival of Lights” is a lovely depiction of nature observed on a journey home from work in wintertime:

I drive home from work. Bright colors frame windows and doors; electric candles rest on windowsills. Pine branches drape entry ways, even garage doors. Pulsing lights reveal the limbs of leafless saplings. Wooden Santas, nutcracker soldiers, and white deer pose on snowless lawns.

at home
blue menorah candles
smolder

Several haibun focus on Straw’s father. “Stronger Grip” reflects on his father’s illness in a heartbreaking contemplation. Before the writer hurries off to catch a plane, he plays a childhood game with his father who is in a private hospital room:

I tell him that I have to hurry back to the airport for a midday flight. Then I reach for his hand, and we play an old game: “Who has the stronger grip?” This time, I let him win. I try to smile as I say, “Bye, take care.”

After saying goodbye and talking to a nurse, the poet tells us his reaction:

I rush into a bathroom and begin sobbing. I continue to cry in the empty elevator, then in the rental car all the way to the airport, quieting finally on the packed plane.

.

Easter snapshot

a boy and his dad

cast one shadow

.

“Handed On,” is a fraught personal reaction to the father’s death and funeral. It is a personification of all the conflicts—belief-versus-practice, memory-versus-history, public-versus-private space—that engage Straw’s work:

Before the funeral service began, my cousins gave me a silver frame, “In Loving Memory of My Father . . .,” with a photo of dad and me shaking hands and smiling on one of our birthdays 20 years before. A pianist played favorite hymns, the new minister from dad and mom’s church did the eulogy, and solemn men from dad’s lodge performed from memory a ceremony in his honor. Asked to say a few words, I merely recited with a bowed head Psalm 23 from an open Bible:

rain on a road
before his coffin is closed
touching dad’s hand

In the lengthy haibun “Sketching from Life,” Straw rightly notes his father’s dislikes and his lifelong job as a welder, and his discovery of a sketch he found on the table a week before his father died:

Dad did one other sketch that I found on his kitchen dinette table the week before he died. He drew it with a ballpoint pen in blue ink on a brown envelope containing a coffee-table book I’d mailed him for what turned out to be his final birthday the year before.

The poignancy of this haibun, with its meticulous attention to detail and its reference to a birthday present that will never be looked at, is extremely touching.

With equally heartfelt empathy, in “Perennials,” Straw writes about his mother:”After 50 years with multiple sclerosis, every nerve she has is scarred. And since dad’s death, premature senility has taken her mind.” He completes the haibun with this poignant memory of his mother:
.

During her first winter there, mom told me she’d been studying “a large menacing goldfish” in the front lobby’s aquarium. She said that most of the other fish in the tank had disappeared, except for one or two hiding in corners. She whispered, “I’ve always been a small fish watching and staying out of the way of larger fish.”

long winter
in an untended flowerbed
tulip bulbs

For Straw the personal so often acts as a medium transporting haibun and reader to another terrain—historical, psychological, religious and physical. As well as seriousness, there’s a great deal of playfulness to be had here too. Take, for instance, the powerful “Fiddling On,” a haibun scanning symbolic and real events. In this excerpt, Straw writes about a photo he shows to his children:

The kids study it, but draw blanks. So, I tell them that years ago my mom photographed my dad, his brother, and me in an Ohio apple orchard. Dad’s and my uncle’s sacks are chock full and sit lopsided in tall grass. The apples lasted until Thanksgiving and went into pies served hot with vanilla ice cream. Our kids never met my uncle, though, and they saw my dad just once or twice. They barely recognize me with my moustache and long hair.

This is typical of Straw’s trick throughout The Longest Time: to guide the reader along trajectories that derive intensity from memory and locale. Quite simply, the book moves us. Through its charting of historical and emotional spectrums, we’re untroubled in attaining the collection’s higher philosophy.

.

by Patricia Prime

Auckland, New Zealand

Charles Hansmann: EN POINTE

Someone’s daughter loves to dance. Any unheard music seems to do, and any partner. The table’s shimmed leg attends her lifted heel. She gains a peek beyond the windowsill.

ballet slippers
pigeon-toed
beside the bed
.
.

by Charles Hansmann
Sea Cliff, New York
first published in Frogpond 31: 1 (Winter 2008)

Stanley Pelter: CITY OF GIFTS

not quite ready to fly
a pale dove flitters
river curve

Fancy going to Florence on Wednesday?
Where?
Florence
Where’s that?
Italy
How come?
Someone’s cancelled. I’ll square it with school.
Thanks....................................................but no thanks.
Why not?.....................................It’s only for a couple of days.
I don’t know anybody. They’re learning Italian. I’m younger than them. I’ve got lots on. .............I don’t want to.
Most are young.........very friendly.........and I’ll be with you.
She is 12........................................Square it with School.

It’s your bat mitzva
What?..............................................Can I sit by the window?
Yes
They have been friendly. She is relaxed. Flight will arrive early morning. Seems to sleep; head to one side, eyes closed. Rapid first growth of morning. Pre-sun glow spreads across a clear blue light of Florentine sky. Opens her eyes. Descent follows bridged line of river Arno. Slowly we lower. Early sun shapes all colours and hues. Luminous space of a City of Gifts is compressed. Not blinking, she looks down on an unfamiliar roofscape. I know that look.

cage glides to earth
which we watch grow large
she silent............wide eyed

Why didn’t you tell me?
There is more

Let’s walk. Go to the Accademia. Visit David
We look up at this translated marble, lit by a midday sun. A dome flows light. A frozen moment of silence dominates space a juvenile giant occupies. At first she doesn’t speak. Then . . .
Who made it? David was the small one, not the giant.
Michelangelo. He does reverse things a bit. Usual image is after their battle. Michelangelo describes that moment when a childman makes a momentous decision, enters an arena of power. One act will change his life forever. See that huge veined hand, its position, sling lifted, ready to kill. Michelangelo was a little man with a broken nose. David was his gigantic, one-man rebellion against convention, against accepted tradition. Single-handedly, this huge Italian created a spatial, a temporal shift that had a profound effect on river flows of art.
I had said too much. Said it all wrong. She says nothing. Is still looking up at this boy who would be King. After two hard years of carving, here he stands, a technical, an aesthetic marvel. Unsurpassed. Maybe those ‘Slaves’ emerging from rocks. Perhaps his ‘Pietà’. We walk away. Walk towards the Ponte Vecchio with its sparkling gold, shining silver shops, past the Uffizi, the Piazza del Duomo, to the Brancacci Chapel. Stand silently before Masaccio’s ‘The Expulsion of Adam and Eve’ and, in disbelief, ‘St Peter healing the Sick with his Shadow’. Walk. Walk in silence. Walk until the sun tires.

She puts her arm through mine like a grown up woman.

river view
see clouds in ways
that change everything
.

.

by Stanley Pelter
Claypole, Lincolnshire, England

Richard Straw: FIDDLING ON

In late October, the last of summer's crickets can still be heard amid the leaves and twigs near my office here in North Carolina. They're not like the ones I grew up with in Ohio that are driven underground a bit earlier by colder weather.

Once I get home, I flip through several family albums, looking for one photo in particular. I almost don't hear my wife calling me downstairs for supper. At the table, I pass around the photo, saying, "See anyone you know?"

The kids study it, but draw blanks. So, I tell them that years ago my mom photographed my dad, his brother, and me in an Ohio apple orchard. Dad's and my uncle's sacks are chock full and sit lopsided in tall grass. The apples lasted until Thanksgiving and went into pies served hot with vanilla ice cream. Our kids never met my uncle, though, and they saw my dad just once or twice. They barely recognize me with my moustache and long hair.

I don't tell them of the evening when my uncle, surrounded by his family, died painfully at home of lung cancer. I also don't tell them of the night my dad called me after he learned he had terminal cancer in early autumn as the leaves were turning red and gold. They're beginning to realize on their own why my mom doesn't say much when we phone her on Sundays at the nursing center, that her premature senility doesn't mean she loves them any less.

"Someday," I do say, "we'll go apple picking. Wouldn't that be fun?"

apple pickers gone
down among the windfall
a muted cricket

.

by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina
haibun first published in Contemporary Haibun Online V3, N2 (June 2007)
haiku first published in Acorn 17 (Fall 2006)

Catherine Mair & Patricia Prime: FOREBEARS

I swish back the curtains. There's a drowned cabbage-tree silhouetted against the sea-grey sky. Rain forms a mini-waterfall from each sword-like leaf. At the supermarket I notice sunflowers propped in a bucket. Sunflowers! for a rainy day. Sunflowers to brighten Mum's room at the resthome.

an afternoon
for videos—which?
reading glasses at home

The chapbook "Molly's Room" lies on the table. The photo collages remind Duncan of his great-grandparents who arrived in New Zealand in 1870 to set up shop in Remuera (now one of Auckland 's high-end shopping centres). He recalls how an uncle 'married' a Maori girl and fathered five children before his lawful wife arrived from Britain and he fathered another seven with her. The Maori 'wife' returned with her children to her whanau, but one daughter remained with her father. Missionaries taught her to play the piano and eventually she became a concert pianist.

seaman—
his scarred hand
fingers the pages

Skeletons in cupboards. The ambiguity of surnames. How, why—our father, your father?

family wedding
duskier skins
on one side of the church

by Catherine Mair and Patricia Prime
Katikati, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
and Auckland, New Zealand
.

*whanau—family

Charles Hansmann: SLANT

Some times of day don’t show themselves direct—they’re just reflected on the surface, skittish moments slinking down to drink, rippling indistinct the instant that we see them. Then turn around. Some times of day only follow on their memory, haven’t happened till they’re past, a set sun lighting up the hill behind, reappearing as we climb.

up all night
to see what cats see
alley moon

.

by Charles Hansmann
Sea Cliff, New York
first published in Frogpond 31:2 (Spring/Summer 2008)

Dru Philippou: WIND POWER

On the Beaufort Scale of 2, a light breeze forms wavelets, rustles palms. On the scale of 4, a moderate breeze wipes footprints from the sand, blows a sailboat out to sea—

And on 8, a gale of 40 knots, I paddle my surfboard out in the ocean; make it to the lineup, sit-up, and wait for the sets. A swell approaches. Turning the nose of my board shoreward, I start to paddle then stand. I ride towards those palm branches snapping, and breakers crashing against rock; my mother’s voice gone.

a deep-sea
anglerfish slams
its mouth shut—
for a limpet,
an unknown universe.
.

by Dru Philippou
Taos, New Mexico
first published in Modern English Tanka, V3 N2 (Winter 2008)

Richard Straw: DESERT PLACES

In omnibus requiem quaesivi et nusquam inveni nisi in een Hoecken met een Böcken.

.

—Thomas à Kempis

"Everywhere I have sought rest and found it nowhere, save in little nooks with little books." His monastery cell and lancet window reappear now on a second-hand bookstore's shelf, where I find him again remaindered, but translated afresh.

I trust and collect such personal jottings, especially those published anonymously or collected posthumously by friends. Steady correspondents; meditative diarists and fiction writers; reclusive poets, aphorists, and parable tellers; and especially this speaker of homilies to common brethren—all capture the small moments. The words are not short-sighted, despite their authors' often being short-winded. Without them, there's no antidote to the daily bluster.

At home, going at a labyrinth walk's pace, I begin this updated version of the Imitation, penciling in light marginal notes and comparisons with its prior translations. My eyes close to visualize the words. My wristwatch ticks as I breathe air from the past.

mountaintop
I reach out to feel
clouds
.

.

by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina
first published in Contemporary Haibun Online V3, N4 (December 2007)
.

The Thomas à Kempis quotation is from an article by Vincent Scully that appeared in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912, Volume XIV; see http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14661a.htm).