Bill Wyatt: MEMORY LOZENGES

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Jack Kerouac
you’ve got a lot
of answering to do
now that you’re safe
in heaven dead

*

Evening twilight
fills the wine shop
with summer

*

Dharma Bums in my pocket
treading precariously
along the metal bridge
at Maresfield, dropping
my copy of Keble Martin’s
Wild Flowers of Great Britain
into the stream. All those flowers
landing up in Dick Dyke’s
saxophone on the village green
amidst bottles of wine
& cricket players
My glass never empty
heart full of sunshine

*

Dew on the grass
& in my head a bee
is singing

*

Cruising down to Hastings
for a meet with Barry & Eve
Chanting to harmonium, then off
to de la Warr Pavilion
in Bexhill for Buddhist talk
by Sangakshita
My glass never empty
heart full of sunshine

*

Night carving
the morning dew
on the caterpillar’s back

*

Jesus jumping
to Charlie Mingus
Wednesday Night
Prayer Meeting
Thelonious Monk
stepping between
the golden notes
of eternity—
Straight No Chaser
but mine’s
a glass never empty
heart full of sunshine

*

Leaning on a cloud
sun & moon
back in my pocket

*

Cruising to Nottingham
with Bhante’s mob
The Hole in the Wall
chanting in the garden
of long forgotten friends
My glass never empty
heart full of sunshine

*

Moon rises
thru blue sky
& falls
into my wine cup

*

Like Kerouac
always too shy
to read my poems
Sitting in the background
at Pub readings
urging the others on
Too painful to read
with flowers in my hat
My glass never empty
heart full of sunshine

*

Is it the silence—
mouth chants
mind remembers

*

Chang Yang-hao (1269–1329)

Once I was young
then old age caught up with me
Life has drifted by
like yesterday morning
Good times, bad times
like flowing water
Its better to get drunk
& then sleep it off
Let the sun & moon
rise & fall—
so I pretend to know nothing

*

Sonny Rollins on The Bridge
say, just “How are things
in Glocca Morra?”
Last of the tenor giants
going thru different peaks
different troughs
Always coming back on top
Eric Dolphy—Out to Lunch
since 1964
Gone to that other shore
like a Burning Spear
Out There A Far Cry
Serene & just as Softly
As In A Morning Sunrise

*

Three cups of wine
& I have yet to wet my lips—
summer leisure

*

A glass of rose
good as a poesy
as Kerouac’s old Tokay
but I don’t think
that’s wot he’d drink
Persimmon wine
that’s rather fine
So lets get back
to the hermit’s shack
With my glass never empty
& my heart full of sunshine

*

The evening cool—
back in the garden
cultivating simplicity


*……………*……………*


Full moon—20/5/08

by Bill Wyatt
Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, England

Bill Wyatt: ANCESTRAL VOICES ON KOS

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Arrived at apartments in the early hours of the morning. A meteor flew across the balcony & gone in the blink of an eye. Sky glittering with stars, Orion my neighbour. Distant hoot of an owl.

Waiting for the moon –

clouds drift by like orphans

who banish my sorrows

Up early for breakfast, a short walk across the main street of Tigaki, once a small fishing village. Flamingoes winter here in small numbers. Sometimes white storks & pelicans drop in, on their way to Northern Turkey & Eastern Europe. October, the month when the festival of Thesmophorica is celebrated. Held in honour of Demeter & only attended by women, to assure the fertility of the fields.

Back at Tigaki for the evening meal.

Impromptu dance

to Zorba the Greek – waiters

spring into autumn

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October's full moon –

from the taverna, 'doo-wop'

mingles with cicadas

Mosqitoes a problem. After an evening of wining & dining, I'm in no fit state to combat them. Defenceless, when I retire to bed, straight into the arms of sleep & Demeter.In the morning wake up to many lovebites.

As an offering

to this floating world – my blood

accepts the mosquito

Just outside the hotel found several plants new to me. On looking them up, turned out to be Bladder Hibiscus. Pale, large solitary flowers, yellow with dark blue purple centres, opening only in the mornings. A native of Asia.

Just like an autumn leaf

that has lived its day – soft breeze

whirls me away

(after Theocritus)

Theocritus, the Sicilian and bucolic poet lived on Kos for a while. He wrote one of his most ambitious poems here, the idyll which we know of as The Harvest Home. He describes the Koan countryside, with its singing linnets, & larks, & bees that loitered above fresh flowing streams. Where 'elms & black poplars make a shady place there,/ its green freshness roofed in by unkept leaves.'

cicadas welcome

in the evening twilight

ancestral voices

by Bill Wyatt
Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, England

WASHING JADE IN MUDDY WATER: BILL WYATT ON HAIBUN

an interview with Diana Webb

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DW: Describe your life, Bill, before you discovered the world of Zen and haiku.

BW: Born 1942, the first of three kids, each of us born two years apart. My dad taking advantage on leave to father us during the latter part of the war. War babies they called our generation. I had a double hit of scarlet fever during infancy. As a consequence, I was a late developer and didn’t learn to read properly until around ten or eleven. I was fortunate to have a sympathetic teacher who helped me out in writing and art. I remember writing a couple of science fiction stories, my teacher encouraging me to make use of my imagination. But I have to confess that these school days didn’t mean a lot to me. But I did discover the works of Homer which opened up a whole new world for me.

DW: I understand that you became interested in Zen and haiku through reading Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums in 1959 and started writing haiku that year. What in Kerouac attracted you?

BW: The thing about Kerouac was his concept of “spontaneous writing” and how, through his prose, I came across Buddhism and haiku, and that led me on to the works of Suzuki and Blyth. Kerouac was a big influence on me and my generation, especially his side-kicks, Gary Snyder, Phil Whalen and Lew Welch, the original Dharma bums. As far as I am aware, Kerouac didn’t know of the haibun as a genre but many passages from his prose, for me, certainly fit that mode. In a recent Penguin Poets collection, Book of Sketches: 1952 – 1957, Kerouac writes “sketching . . . everything activates in front of you in myriad profusion, you just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words and write with 100 % personal honesty.” In those days, I doubt that he knew of Shiki’s “sketching” method.

DW: What was it that led you from an interest in Zen to becoming, in 1972, the first Zen monk ordained in England?

BW: Check out Summer Dreams: American Haibun and Haiga 3, for “The Early Days of Throssel Hole Priory,” which is a kind of hagiography and written in response to one of the monks who requested that I do a write up on those days.

DW: You went to the USA to train for the Soto Zen priesthood. On your return to England, you said you were hit by “apathy and complacency” and “imagined a situation in a near future when there would be only a few people left struggling with their vision and their poems." In what ways did writing haibun become part of that struggle and of your Zen life as a way of meditation?

BW: When I returned from Shasta Abbey, I was very much on a “high” from al that meditation. While there, I started writing poems in a surrealistic mode. There’s an old Zen saying that before you start, mountains are mountains, then mountains are no longer mountains, and finally mountains become once again mountains. So maybe I was in that second stage which the French surrealists describe as being “the marvelous.” Now and then, I slip into a surrealist haiku mode.

DW: In the BHS Haibun Anthology 2005, David Cobb refers to a style of haibun pioneered by Bill Wyatt, “an engaging patchwork quilt of classical and modern quotations and did-you-know information, in which the author is unobtrusive but pops up from time to time as the ‘link man’ or commentator.” An example of this type of haibun – “Spring Ephemerals,” written about 20 years ago – describes a journey you made to find scarce and rare Breckland wild plants and may have been one of the first haibun written by an Englishman. To what extent were you influenced by the style of Basho’s travel haibun in writing this?

BW: I've always been interested in botanizing, having fallen in love with the works of Andrew Young, 1885-1971, one of our most neglected poets and botanical explorer, and John Clare, 1793-1864, another inspiration through his poetry and natural history writings. I had a bunch of friends interested in bird watching and wild flowers and we would do trips here in England and on the continent. Rather than just make a list of our findings, I hit on the idea of writing up journals in the style of Basho and his predecessors. For the Japanese, this became an art form. They would visit sacred and historical places, making notes of what they observed, interspersed with haiku or tanka. The Greek lyric poets have always been an influence on my haiku, especially those fragments from Sappho. So, in many ways, I see that lyrical influence in my haiku.

DW: How do you think you have brought together the two influences of Basho and Kerouac in your work?

BW: Hopefully it's just the spontaneity. First thought, best thought (though we might have to go back and do a bit of tidying up!).

DW: Some of your haibun are about travels in Greece. How have you managed to incorporate both the world of Hellenic myth and the world of Basho in your haibun?

BW: My poems stem from the worlds of Herakleitos and Diogenes in Greece to Chuang Tzu and Han Shan in China. Basho, Issa and Buson encounter the cosmic fragments of Sappho and the Greek lyric poets. Bodhidharma has lunch with the cicada immortals. Sappho, with all the associations of the Japanese word sabi (loneliness), comes out of the past and tugs at my heart. The birds of the air and the flowers of the field – do they listen to our songs and paint us with colours?

DW: Some of the haibun written in the West now are very different from Basho’s Rucksack Dispatches and your own “Spring Ephemerals,” moving away from the chronicling of the simple life-style of the traveling Zen monk, with its celebrations of birds and flowers, to explorations of human relationships and the struggles within them. How do you feel about this development?

BW: Western haibun has to be an ongoing process. A lot of what I see appears to be something out of a creative writing course. No soul.

DW: In many of your own haibun, the haiku seem to play the crucial role of creating a recurring sense of the elusive spirit of Zen within nature, amid the day-to-day practicalities of traveling. What for you, Bill, marks the proper balance and relationship between haiku and prose in haibun?

BW: For me, haiku highlights the preceding prose, capturing that magical moment.

DW: What do you think will be the future direction of haibun in the West?

BW: From what I see, it could go anywhere, Maybe we need another name or definition. I stick with old Ezra Pound and let's “make it new.”

DW: Do you still feel as you did in the 70s that the future may hold a situation in which only a few people will be left struggling with their vision?

BW: Everybody should stick with their vision. But at the same time, realise that our visions change. I am no longer the person I was in the 70s. Next year, my vision could equally change. The only reality in life is change, but who's prepared to accept that.

Before I was born
washing jade in muddy water
I knew nothing else.

Bill Wyatt: from SPRING EPHEMERALS

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Following in the footsteps of Thomas Willisell, the old soldier who played a large part in the development of field botany and of whom John Ray said 'a soldier who having taken great affection to the botanical studies hath arrived to a great knowledge in plants.' My task, 300 years on – to trace and find those rare Breckland plants, spring ephemerals that only lasted for a short period of time.

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With my companion we set off for Suffolk. In what seemed like no time at all, we arrived at Barton Mills roundabout...

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Out of the mud

discarded furniture

and spring vetch!

Barton Mills, taking its name from a large corn-mill and wharf on the river Lark. Church of flint and tile, biscuit and grey; here we also found a small plant belonging to the chickweed family – the little Mouse-ear, a widespread but local flower in bare, sandy ground.

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We stopped off in Brandon to check out our B&B. Everywhere old streets shaded by trees. There is something timeless about Brandon, 'a thoroughfare town' on the crossing of Little Ouse, ancient industries of flint and fur now replaced by forestry. When men were knapping flints, Homer was reciting the deeds of Odysseus. Houses made from flint, walls, pavements, the church too. After settling things with the landlord, we drove off to Bodney church a few miles away, across the Norfolk border in search of Drooping Star of Bethlehem. This tiny flint church stands on a mound overlooking a farmhouse. During the French Revolution nuns fled their country and took refuge in the hall; one was the daughter of the Prince of Conde. Their remains lie in the churchyard, surrounded by firs and elms; a stream runs just below the church and birds sing in the trees...

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So far from home –

sleeping nuns protected by

Star of Bethlehem

Our next stop was Weeting, said to be the earliest inhabited part of Norfolk. It was here that Hereward the Wake hid out in what now remains of a moated late 12th century hall. Nearby stands the prehistoric site known as Grime's Graves. Hundreds of circular pits lie scattered about, once flint quarries worked by men who used stone hammers before the pyramids were built. In the heart of Breckland 4000 years drift by...

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Among the bracken

and silver birches – antler picks

picking out flintstones

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Then drove on the Lakenheath, with its terrible place in the pages of history. During the Peasant Rising of 1381, after the Black Death, the serfs decided that it was time for their freedom. John of Lakenheath, warden of the barony, to escape the enforcers of the State of Labourers, fled to Bury St Edmunds Abbey. Chief Justice Cavendish was on circuit in Suffolk, and being recognised by one of the rebels, took immediate flight. He tried to board a boat on the river, but a woman saw him and pushed the boat into mid-stream. He was caught and later decapitated, his head taken to Bury St Edmunds and set up alongside those of John of Lakenheath and John of Cambridge, the prior of the Abbey. Lakenheath was originally a hythe or landing-place in the fens. Once the largest US airbase in Britain, now thankfully gone...

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On the way home, as though inebriated by sun, moon, stars, flowers and birds, suddenly remembering that life is no more than a temporary home, sheltering us from a winter shower, with all its uncertainties and impermanence.

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Dozing in the car I reflected on old Tom Willisell who had tramped these parts so long ago. Once a foot-soldier under Cromwell. then a maker of pegs for shoes. John Ray wrote to Edward Lllwyd on 22 March 1692 – 'T Willisell, who was indefatigable and could endure any hardship, and live as well upon oatcakes and whig as another man upon flesh and wine, and ramble over hills, mountains, woods and plains. Poor Tom Willisell's loss, I cannot remember without some trouble.'

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Out of the skull

endlessly grinning –

spring ephemerals

by Bill Wyatt

Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, England

first published in Blithe Spirit, June 1999

Bill Wyatt: DRAGON'S BREATH & MOUNTAIN MADNESS

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We eventually arrived at the Pyrenees to be greeted by Red & Black Kites & Griffon Vultures. Elated we found a nearby campsite and brewed up. It started to rain, not heavy, so we set off for a local restaurant & had an evening meal. Weather beginning to break up, dragon's breath rolling down mountains.

After breakfast we walked round some of the Cirque de Gavarnie. Very dramatic treading along wood edges, finding endemic plants including Dragonmouth, Pyrenian, Columbine, P.Squill, P. Cranesbill, P.Valerian & P. Saxifrage. Also a snowfinch, not more than ten feet away, happily eating seeds. Maybe a Golden Eagle too, high up in the sky.

After a wet evening, we broke camp and pushed on through the French & then the Spanish Pyrenees, rain following us as we climbed up & then down the mountains. Dragon’s breath not far behind us.

Once we reached the plains, clouds disappeared, opening up into vast clear blue sky. We stopped off for Spanish bread. I'm sure that by then we were all suffering from mountain madness. Too many late nights of endless rain & that French Old Lady Gin, leading to big bluesy Jack Kerouac hangovers.

Mountain madness –
soaking wet, like tattered rags
laughing at ourselves

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Steve spoke to the shop owner, in English, "Hello mate, a loaf of bread please." This had brother Tony in stitches, & I had to help him out of the shop, before he finally flipped. It turned out that Steve had thought the shop owner was speaking to him in English.

We drove off & stopped again for cheese and bread, Tony in fits whenever we mentioned the bread shop. As we ate, relaxing in the heat, a quail walked indifferently past us.

Sweltering sun
"wet my lips" – the quail seems to
have the right take on things

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After further adventures in Spain, only to be rained off, we made our way back to Gavarnie & found an ideal campsite on a farm. Rain holding back as we put up our tents. We explored the countryside, finding in the meadow above us five different orchids, Tunic Flower, & Carthusian Pink. We had a cook up, tin of beans, lentils & sausages, onions, garlic & carrots. Just as we finished the meal, the sky opened up & off to bed. Woke up around 4am. to find that the tent was awash with water. Tony soaked right through in his sleeping bag. I wasn't too badly off, as I had a camp bed, which kept me off the wet floor. But rain coming in through the sides of the tent. Tony disappeared into Steve's car until daylight.

So, enough was enough & we broke camp in the morning. In dismal rain we headed back for the coast & England. Followed by dragon’s breath, always on our tail.

Dragon’s breath
covering the morning sun –
muffling birdsongs

by Bill Wyatt
Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, England
first published in Presence 31, Jan. 2007

Bill Wyatt: from CICADA IMMORTALS part 2

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I arose earlier than the others, & made my way up to the old Genoese Castle in the morning light. Two Rock Nuthatches obliged after some waiting, with a dancing display. The Little Owl put in an appearance, looking more than bleary.

'Bringing news of spring
the nightingales love song'
Sappho

After breakfast we drove out to Scala Kalonis. Walked along a dried out salt pan area, managed to see two much wanted birds- Whiskered Tern & Olivaceous Warbler. Plants were few & far between. We later found that the winter had been one of the driest on record.

A barefoot girl
the wind lifting her skirt
made me forget about myself

Just outside of Molivos, we stopped & found growing by the roadside a clump of Syrian Thistle (Notobasis syriaca) The purple-flushed Syrian Thistle, despite its wonderful colouring, comes from a Greek derogatory word meaning "donkey thistle".

It must have been
your lips that sent
your friends away

Plenty of Isabelline Wheatears, their Latin name, Oenanthe, meaning a bird that appears at the same time as the first shoot of the vine.

Down by the sea shore
all the world was shining –
just for you and me

It was getting late, so we headed for our "breakfast bar", no time for a wash & clean up. They were laying on the satellite Cup Final for us. Exciting match, especially as we had a "stuffed" eagle staring at us from the television set. The match 3-3 after extra time. Crystal Palace leading Manchester United 3-2 with 8 minutes of normal time left. Replay next Thursday, the day we get back home.

We finished up back at our digs with wine and listened to some blues and jazz tapes. One of those nights when dreams become immortal.Remembering Plato's words, just as I fell asleep, “Some say nine muses – but I count again, behold the tenth, Sappho of Lesbos.”

In the meadow
horses graze on
the flowers of spring

Lesbos, May 1990

by Bill Wyatt

Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, England

first published in Presence 33, Sept. 2007