Richard Straw: Retrospective Haibun, or Why I Love the Past

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I’m a writer with strong nostalgic longings. One of my favorite essayists is Charles Lamb, someone else who labored for decades as a harmless office worker and who also longed for and wrote mostly about the past. Gerald Monsman talks about this aspect of Charles Lamb in Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer: Charles Lamb's Art of Autobiography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984). For example, see pp. 40-42:

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Because quotidian or physical reality presents itself as a privation, Lamb's work is "mainly retrospective," as Walter Pater noted...For Elia, the South-Sea House in its desolation becomes a symbol of all vanished glory―all forms of absence or distance in space, time, and consciousness that undermine the original grounding of reality...In the "Oxford" essay, Elia shifts his scene analogously, moving from the outer world of the present to an interior world of the past in quest of a reality that will underwrite existence...The present is always "flat, jejune" (lacking nourishing quality), and the past seems to beckon men to an escape from the insipid starved present.

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Monsman then quotes from Lamb's "Oxford in the Vacation," the second in the Essays of Elia:

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Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art every thing! When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity—then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou called'st it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being every thing! the past is every thing, being nothing!

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I titled my first collection of haibun The Longest Time because the past is the time that I've lived in and think about the most. The present is so fleeting it's almost nonexistent, and the future of course is unknown. This situation is bound to intensify as I age.

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by Richard Straw

Cary, North Carolina

Richard Straw: Background Story, or Would You Like Prose with That Haiku?

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old red Schwinn
abandoned in weeds―
outburst of rain

The "old red Schwinn" poem was written on May 23, 1988. I was probably smoking a Marlboro Light at the time and resting my haiku notebook on my knee as I sat on the front porch steps of my first owned home in North Carolina. I was keeping an eye on my first child, who was 2 years old then. She was in front of me in her stroller and waiting to be pushed around the block again, a ritual we performed each night when I got home from work. I must have seen some neighborhood boy race his bike on the downhill straightaway that was the street in front of our house. Back then, seeing any bicyclist triggered daydreams about my old bike.

As a teenager in central Ohio, I'd sold Christmas card "subscriptions" door to door one summer to save enough money to help my parents buy the Schwinn for me (we went "halfsies"). Later, after I earned more money doing some gardening for a widow who lived near us, I hung matching wire baskets over its rear tire, a combination speedometer and odometer on its handlebars, and a rearview mirror near its left grip. I rode my Schwinn out to a quarry past the county fairgrounds to the north and to the basketball courts and baseball diamonds at all of the city parks, many of which were named after U.S. Presidents who had died in office―Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy. And of course, I often rode downtown to the Goodwill Store near the Episcopal Church so I could browse in its 10 cent bookracks, or I'd head for the cigar store in the shadow of the courthouse so I could leaf through the newest comic books (and peek at the girlie mag displays). Later, I'd bike to the Carnegie Public Library next to my parents' Baptist church where I "discovered" Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass one fateful summer afternoon.

The bike and I were inseparable until I loaned it to a friend to ride one summer morning. He said he needed to borrow it so he could go swimming with some other friends at a reservoir about 10 miles or so south of town. However, he abandoned the bike in a ditch after he ran over a nail and got a flat tire. And he neglected to tell me what happened until much later, too late for my dad and me to go out to find it.

The photograph was taken by my mom at the start of my one-and-only overnight bike hike in the mid-1960s. Our Boy Scout troop met on Monday evenings in the basement of a Methodist church downtown. One year, the scoutmaster decided we were old enough for a bike hike. So, we pedaled out of town about 10 miles to a small roadside park next to an abandoned electric power plant near a river, just 2 miles north from the village where my family lived in the early 1950s.

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I seem to remember that my dad had to drive out with a replacement chain or tire for my bike at the halfway point of the hike. He may even have driven me to the roadside park with my repaired bike in the trunk of his Impala because the rest of the troop had gone ahead without me.

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The power plant had a spooky, brick smokestack taller than anything else for miles around. Years later, when I read from William Blake's "Jerusalem," the line that goes "among these dark Satanic mills" made me remember that old building and its gloomy outbuildings encircled by barbwire and "Keep Out" signs. Looking up from a marshmallow browned by that long-dead campfire in the mid-1960s, I prayed that the oak woods wouldn't catch fire.

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by Richard Straw

Cary, North Carolina

Richard Straw: Haibun: It's a Family Thing

A haibun is a family gathering, perhaps a reunion, of young and old and middle aged. Some dads huff prose and some cousins whisper poetry and some sons and daughters do a bit of both or talk gibberish like an uncle through his beer and mustache. All are interacting, replaying old lines, trying new routines, listening to each other, or sleeping in front of the TV, the butt of a face-painting prank. The prose members and the haiku members can say the same lines elsewhere in another setting, such as in a formal gathering of poems or in a critic's selective review. Words voiced separately may even gain some acclaim and applause. Although what's said in nonfamily settings will sound similar to what was said before, it will have a different meaning, a loss usually of context. Outside the haibun family and its relationships, the family members will have different personalities, none perhaps as dynamic as what they share with those who also have similar lips and eyes, tones and intentions.

end of summer
another family
in my old home

So, in a haibun, the prose and the haiku can and will stand alone, just as they can and will stand together, depending on how a reader, the stranger, chooses to experience them. Haibunists can't expect that everything they write will be read in sequence and in its entirety. Novella-length haibun need to be broken up into edible parts, or they may not be read at all. Even some careful readers, such as Samuel Johnson, skim across the page and through a book, much like skaters on a river. The effect of the words that are read, either silently in one's head or aloud in an armchair or on a stage, will also vary depending on a reader's short-term memory and ability to comprehend what the writer may think has been clearly enunciated in black and white. It's all relative so to speak.

by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina

Richard Straw: Stronger Grip

On a Sunday morning, dad's sitting in a private hospital room by a sunlit window. He tells me his doctors have agreed to let him use a chair even though he can't get out of it by himself. He says they haven't decided yet whether to do more cutting or more chemotherapy or nothing at all: "But they'll get paid whatever they do . . ."

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."

Outside his room, a medication nurse listens to me stammer, "Check . . . him . . . make sure . . . doesn't fall . . ." But I can't complete a sentence.

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

by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina
first published in bottle rockets #19, August 2008

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)

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

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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)

Richard Straw: DESERT PLACES

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

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

Richard Straw: RETRACINGS

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(from Acts 13:13 to 14:28)

Ah, the salty air from Paphos to Perga; bold words then in Pisidia's Antioch and in Iconium, but driven away from each, almost molested; worshiped in Lystra as if Barnabas and I were Zeus and Hermes, but stoned by the same gullible crowds, dragged out of their city, and left for dead; revived by new friends somehow for a long walk the next day to Derbe, not far from Tarsus, my old Tarsus, over the Taurus Mountains; returning finally here where we'd started our inland journey, but first walking all the way back through the towns we'd preached in and been run out of, walking upright through them all, talking our way to little Perga and into Attalia, a spot to remember on this endless coast of the Mare Internum.

at sea at dawn
dust-caked tunics
daven on deck

by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina

Richard Straw: DOLOR

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"I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils…"

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Theodore Roethke *

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I have a job, but am sometimes out of work. I try to sit patiently then in silence, without grimaces, expecting nothing. Work will eventually arrive to be edited, to dissolve the time away. Without it, I'm lost in broad daylight, prone to sort and re-sort my pens, pencils, and schedules. I'll even brush my teeth and straighten the telephone cord so its one loop turns toward the green banker's lamp, a gift from my parents. Or I'll stack my snack change by year near my coffee cup, arrange my reference books alphabetically by author, and clean the computer keyboard. Sometimes, I'll daydream of the drive home, with the radio tuned to jazz.

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gone one evening

the black, brown, and sorrel

thick tousles of grass

* From the poem of the same name in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (New York: Anchor Books, 1975, p. 44).

by Richard Straw

Cary, North Carolina

first published in Lynx XXIII:1, February 2008

Richard Straw: BLESSING

"Son, I'm taking the last apple."

"Can we share it?"

After washing my hands, then the Granny Smith, I cut the apple and slice away its seed-filled core. He takes the piece closest to him from my hand as he types up his school assignment, a paragraph on "My Dream House":

My Dream House

Here are some of my favorite things in my dream house. One of my favorite places in my dream house is the family room. In the family room, I have a big-screen TV. Also, I have a huge couch that has a canopy. Another favorite place in the house is the game room has almost all the games in the world. My most favorite room is the candy room because it has all types of candy from around the world. The last thing I am going to tell you about is the indoor pool. The indoor pool has a slide that is 50 feet high. I would never want to leave my dream house.

Now, this Sunday morning, my son practices his Torah portion with a Hebrew tutor for his upcoming Bar Mitzvah. I listen without understanding because I never learned Hebrew. Nor can I describe my dad's grave as nearly as well as my son described his dream house. I've not visited the grave in the 5 years since dad was buried, about the same time my son was dreaming of his perfect future home. The ground's probably frosted over dad. Will I make the trip again? I think instead of dad's empty work shirts piled on the basement steps, or hanging from a kitchen doorknob, and the dark welding burns on the spot of skin over his heart.

frost on the grass
of my father's grave
a Hebrew chant

by Richard Straw

Cary, North Carolina

Richard Straw: BUSY BEING BORN

It's early December, and thick snowflakes are falling, brightening what's left of an afternoon. My sister and I clomp home in our unsnapped black galoshes the half-block from the elementary school. We try not to drop our latest artwork on the wet slate sidewalk. The yellow-curtained outside basement door is unlocked. So, we droop our wet caps and scarves and coats on the rickety clotheshorse at the bottom of the steps. Ice melts from our boots and socks, which we leave on yesterday's newspaper spread over a rug on the landing. Our cats sniff at the ice puddles as we climb the stairs.

In the overheated kitchen, mom's baking sugar cookies shaped like pine trees and sprinkling them with sweet green crystals. Shiny metal cookie cutters for a bell, a star, and a snowman wait on floured wax paper spread across the black countertop. When dad gets home from the factory, mom tells us, we'll all go out after supper to find a live Christmas tree. And by bedtime, just as she promised, a tall evergreen has been wedged into a red metal tripod base filled with tap water. The tree's too wide for the sun-room where mom's caged canaries sing, so it fills a space to the right of the red brick fireplace. Mom spreads old sheets below it to catch any falling needles. Next to the bare tree, our tee-shirted dad sits in a black armchair, his feet in gray socks crossed on a footstool. Mom tells him that pine smells better than his Pall Malls and Maxwell House coffee. He laughs a "good night," then reopens the newspaper with his big hands as we hurry with mom up the stairs.

The next morning, a Saturday, dad brings down boxes of Christmas decorations from the attic and helps mom string the tree with blinking white lights and the more fragile ornaments. They top it with an electric, golden-winged angel, but let us toss the tinsel and hang the ornaments we made at school and in church. As a last item, I hook a thin, long-faced wooden Santa in a threadbare suit next to my sister's pink plastic ballerina in a white tutu. Mom hangs from golden hooks on the wooden mantel red stockings trimmed in white and stuffed with candy, bubble gum, and other treats for each of us, even the cats.

On Sunday, there's something new on the blond TV cabinet. The old clock that usually sits on faded white lace, the one with the pretty girl on a swing, is gone. In its place a new crèche rests between two toy spruces on green felt, all sprinkled with white glitter to look like snow. A hole for the Star of Bethlehem has been cut into the stable's front panel, and an electric socket for a night light is in the back. Angels of the Lord, the Wise Men, sheep and shepherds (one with a lamb on his shoulders), and a camel form a half-circle before the wood-paneled stable. A cow reclines nearby under a poinsettia. Jesus is in his manger, and Mary and Joseph kneel beside him.

Two weeks before Christmas on a late gray Sunday afternoon, dad and mom bundle us into the back seat of their red-and-white Ford Fairlane. We drive downtown, turn right at the courthouse, then head north on Main. Turning left at the radio station near the pet clinic, we begin to see white cornfields partially crossed by thin-slatted snow fences. The wind tries to push the high drifts closer to the lonely farmhouses and silent silos and barns. We glide over the hump of a railroad track and slowly ease across a one-lane bridge. Brown seedpods of cattails and tall shrubs tell where the riverbanks end.

Across from a Methodist church in mom's old home village, we pile out under a streetlight. Entering a small house by its back door, we leave our boots in a mudroom attached to a cluttered garage. Opening the door to the flower-wallpapered kitchen releases a wave of warmth and smells of ham, meatloaf, green beans, mashed and scalloped potatoes, and coffee. The room's abuzz with aunts in aprons who say "hello, how are you," and reprimand uncles for dipping their fingers in the pots. My sister and I quickly find the little room behind the stairs where we play Old Maid and Chutes 'n' Ladders with our cousins.

After supper, an uncle snores in an armchair, a baby on his lap, while the others talk with grandpa and grandma in the kitchen about the new President's first year in office. The men have more cherry pie and sip creamy, sugared coffee. The women finish up the dishes. On the carpet in the glow of the TV, my favorite cousin and I giggle as we watch Tiger Lily lean and sing and prance and dance with her band of Indian friends: "Ugga wugga wigwam!...Ugga wugga meatball!!"

spiraling snow
shadows of footprints
on a front yard
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Notes: The title is from " It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," a 1965 Bob Dylan song: "...he not busy being born / Is busy dying." Tiger Lily's dance from the December 8, 1960, NBC broadcast of Mary Martin as "Peter Pan" can be viewed on YouTube.

by Richard Straw

Cary, North Carolina

Richard Straw: SUNDAY DRIVE

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

by Richard Straw

Cary, North Carolina

Richard Straw: RIPENESS

Autumn's a slow process, like rust. Cars abandoned last longer than their drivers. I feel "immortal" as nature decays.

Dad's father has died. My parents and I find the funeral home, and I go in first. As I approach his open casket, grandpa jumps out and dances a jig.

turn of the year
sunlight cuts deeper
into the trees

by Richard Straw

Cary, North Carolina

Richard Straw: FLEDGLING

Cool, clear morning. As I lock the car, a fledgling robin tumbles out of a small bush between two parking lots. Its mother keeps herself between us as it stumbles across the pebbly asphalt. She has a bit of worm in her beak. When I move away, the mother closes in, pushes the worm into
its wide-open mouth.

Sitting at my desk, I see my car, the otherwise empty lots, the bush. Two dark little shapes (even the chick!) hop over the low curb into the pine straw.

And I remember last night's dream of my hometown: sidewalks full of people, the soda fountain where my parents met, and the clean street shining in sunlight.

cold evening rain
my toddler daughter dances
flashlight in hand

by Richard Straw

Cary, North Carolina