James Roderick Burns
A Japanese form
Of seventeen syllables
(Five, seven, and five)
The haiku concerns
Itself in the main with shots
Of nature: pictures
Commemorating
Or immortalizing its
Changing elements.
Freezing a moment
Of nature in a hard, clear
Representation.
However, it must
Also suggest more than this.
The haiku should make
Metaphysical
Connections, comments even,
Which bring together
Two disparate things
For implied comparison,
And put us in brief
Contact with a flash
Of truth that is greater than
Any message which
Might be paraphrased
Out of the entire poem.
An old example:
Gardeners, watching
Their treasured borders at night,
Miss the morning shoots.
She heard the shrill cry of a seabird and woke from her dream. Its details lost their substance, falling like clinker through a cooling grate, and left her mind clear and empty in the morning light. She stirred from the armchair by the fire place, knocked a blackened log back onto the hearth and shaking her heavy limbs went to the door of the cottage. The wind was tearing across the water, pulling whitecaps up off the waves and throwing them against the shore. She shivered and gathered her cardigan round her neck, thinking of the coming storm. If her husband had lived and they'd had a son, she would have brought him to this place and laid a hand on his shoulder, bracing his collarbone with her fingers and turning his head into the wind; or a daughter, stroking her nape with a curling palm and guiding her eyes to the sea. As it was she didn't wish for a partner, a lover or a child, feeling the brackish lust of the gale and the sounding courtship of the distant waves. She yielded only to the landscape, and to the rain.
This was the seventh year she had come here. November had begun to seem like a time of neutral, almost imperceptible detachment. The heavy shunt of the clattering rails and the crowded, high-rooted station no longer disturbed her but were as familiar as the calm of her previous life, even contributing (though she couldn't say how) to a sense of her own peculiar existence in their mingling, slightly shabby details. She had tried, and failed, to explain to herself the comfort of distance. Perhaps it was simply the broadening of perspective when she left the city; certainly her senses were opened and widened like seeds beneath the measureless winter sky. But she was unhappy with this. Perhaps what soothed her was the knowledge that as she left one set of circumstances far behind--left it to unravel like discarded plaid between the dwindling tracks--she would naturally move into another, shrugging on its half-familiar shape with little effort, settling down beneath the wool or beaten leather as if it had lost the stiff shine of formal clothing and crumpled into the dented arches of a casual suit. But was this knowledge, could she know it? Perhaps the only truth was that she couldn't know anything; and the only calm her apparent ability to live without knowing, or longing too deeply to find out, in the orange evenings beside the sea.
The woman had smiled when she realized this. As soon as she had washed and eaten she closed the thick wooden door behind her and went into the garden. Its convulsions of broad leaf and cracked stem engulfed her like a sack of hands, running swiftly and onto the coast. The garden covered most of the hillside, and fell away to the rocky shore with the freedom and bouncing speed of a barrowload of upturned apples. It was broken only by a crude rubble pathway which led from a nearby farm to the small fishing town several miles along the coast. She came quickly down the garden, her arms swinging by her sides, till the sole of her boot bit into the caked dust of the roadway and she stopped. Breathing heavily, but smiling, the woman gathered up her skirt and sat down on a milestone to wait.
A few minutes later she heard the uneven crunching of wheels and got to her feet. An antique trap drawn by a small brown horse came into view; as it pulled up beside her the driver loosened a large scarf from his neck, took off his cap and lying back made himself comfortable in his seat.
Mornin,' he said.
Good morning, How are you? It's been a long time. How have things been? How's your cheese?
Not cheese, i's junket--y'ought to know that be now. Other than that, 'm alright. 'Ow're you?
I'm fine, fine.
Their speech was short and unadorned, as it had always been. It scarcely changed, though they saw each other only in November. She had leant on the creaking wood and spoken to him, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes for an hour, every morning since they'd met by chance seven years ago, on her first day by the land's edge. He was about sixty, and thin under the bunched swaddling of his clothes; his creased face was brown and stippled, with a suggestion of bones sharp beneath the skin. Occasionally, as he talked, his eyes would turn on the sea and pull the flesh of his neck and cheeks into smooth planks like the boards of a gangway. Every morning he carried a small load of milk and junkets to the grocers' shops in town. It brought him little profit and cost him a couple of hours' working time--the coast road was unsuitable for the farm lorries--but it exercised his daughter's animals and gave him a lasting pleasure. He loved to watch the waves pour like cream onto the pebbles and the scraps of flint. They sealed themselves to his sight with rolling knots of foam. And he loved the woman.
She wrapped her arms around the backboard and asked him what he had in the trap.
Four chums, same as al'ays, an' twenny pots a junket. Oh, an' a few baskets a seaweed we got up fro' the beach. Gedge wants to mek some kind a fancy pastry, wi' cheese an' cream an' that stuff chopped up fine like spinach. D'yo want some milk? Sometimes he took out a dipper and ladled milk into a can for her. As she drank it she looked at him, and thought of the cow with her leathery, gentle face lazing above the udders.
I'd think I'd like it. She found a calm depth in the flow of his voice, as much as in what he said; it seemed to lessen the distance of the sky and land and water, to bring them within her reach. She looked at the silvery milk churns and the plashed wicker junket pots as though they, too, were bound to the immediate earth and to him. She found that she couldn't say anything more. She smiled at him as he prepared to move off, and as he rounded a corner, waved.
The net morning she arrived on the road long before he was due to come, and stood looking at the sea while she waited. But when the trap pulled it up it didn't stand for long. One of his favourite dogs had been crushed by a reversing lorry, and he'd had to bury it in pieces. She put out a hand to touch his, but he was already flicking the reins. Only a slow crunching accompanied the cart as it disappeared. In the following days they spoke more, and occasionally less. He told her that he had received a letter from an old friend with whom he'd been in the navy, and who had been to China; that the space between the prow of a nosing ship and the hollow of a wave looks like a ditch but feels like a gorge. He had retouched the worn patches in the surface of the trap and brought them to their original colour, then spread a varnish as deep and lustrous as ebony over every panel. The day after that he upset an entire churn of milk, soaking his trousers and flooding the curd pots with warm rich liquid. She laughed so much that he eventually saw it as funny.
Every morning she looked forward to meeting him, and even to hearing her own voice, though it still sounded lost and disconnected in her ears. She had begun to think of him in the afternoons and when she lay in bed; as she fell asleep she felt a new and hesitant thought hovering in her mind, but could not quite take hold of it. Something was edging towards her.
On the seventh day the woman saw the trap shining like a mace in the hands of the distant hillside. It was black in the winter sun. When it stopped they greeted one another, and he gestured for her to get it. She climbed up onto the seat behind him. He motioned the horse to move on.
Where are we going? she said. There seemed to be no surprise in her voice.
Yo'r wanted in the town. Y'ungry? There's some junket do'n there, by yo'r feet. She bent down and picked up a rectangular box. The curds were smooth and fragrant inside. She spoke between mouthfuls of food as they ground along slowly beside the sea. He said his friend had sent a little book with the letter, more like a pamphlet, really, full of stories and pictures and things. Would she like to hear a story, just to pass the time?
She nodded. He looped the reins over one hand and fished inside his pocket. The book was slim and black, with a tracery of forking silver on its cover. He opened it and jammed his thumb against the spine, pressing it into his splayed fingers. Jus' a story, then he said. Nothin' much, but it'll keep yo' 'appy. I'll jus' read y' a story.
Two
A scholar thought it was about time he got married, but had always been too critical and so never found anybody. Once when visiting a distant city the landlady of his guest house arranged for him to see someone from the area, and he found that they were of the same class. The matchmaker asked him to go to a certain temple the next morning to meet the woman.
Full of anticipation, he could barely sleep at all that night and rose at a very early hour. Outside he could still see the moon, and when he reached the temple he caught sight of an old man sitting on the steps, reading something by the moonlight. Being a scholar, the man was intrigued, and approaching him asked the man what he was reading, and in what language.
May I ask what you are reading? I am acquainted with a great many languages, but I've never seen this one.
Of course you haven't, the old man replied. You are an earthly creature, and this is a heavenly book.
Oh, then you must be a god, said the scholar. What are you doing? (Even in this odd situation he could not stifle his curiousity.)
I am in charge of marriage, and as this is the time of day when yin and yang meet I am about the business of connecting the mortal and immortal worlds.
Then you are just the person I need to talk to! said the scholar. I am to meet a woman here this morning--will it be a successful union?
The old man asked for his name, and after leafing through his book said, Oh. I am afraid this will be unsuccessful. All marriages are determined by fate and written down in this book. Your future wife is at present only three years old; you will marry her when she is seventeen.
So I have fourteen years of bachelorhood to look forward to? The meeting will be useless?
Of course.
The scholar was both angry and incredulous, but he couldn't simply this strange old man. What's in your bag? he asked, stalling.
Red threads, the old man replied. Whenever any couple is born I find them and connect their feet with these threads, and once they are tied together in this way nothing can ever separate them--not even if one is rich and one poor, one a northerner and one from the deepest mountains of the south; they will become a married couple in the end. It's all predetermined.
So where is my future wife?
She's accompanying a relative in a vegetable market not far from here, the old man said, and naturally the scholar pressed him for a viewing. They soon arrived at the crowded, dirty market and the old man pointed to a sickly-looking child sitting beside a pile of vegetables. That is your future wife, he said.
At this time the young man became enraged, and hastily left the market. The next day he and his servant returned. He asked the servant to kill the child. The man took out his shining knife and ran towards her, striking out as he moved, then they both ran away as fast as they could.
When they were at a distance the scholar asked if he had killed her, but the servant replied that she had turned away at the last moment, and he had only cut her right brow. So the scholar was forced to flee the area.
He went to the capital and gave up all thoughts of marriage. However, four years later he was restless again, and arranged a marriage with the daughter of a powerful family. Yet this alliance was not to be--the girl committed suicide on the eve of their wedding; it turned out she had secretly loved another man. Then he met the daughter of a local landlord, and fell in love. After their engagement he went to buy her jewels, but when he returned he found her gravely ill, and after a month had gone by she lost all her hair and died.
Many years passed. He had abandoned all hope of marriage, and was working for the local government. The chief admired his diligence and competence, and offered him the hand of his niece. The scholar felt he could not refuse. Though he was initially ill at ease, the woman turned out to be very beautiful, and always wore her hair in a wide attractive sweep across her brow. Many months later, when they were deeply in love, he asked her why she never changed the way she wore her hair, and she responded that she had been attacked as a child, and had a scar on her face which she wanted to hide.
Is it on your right brow? the scholar asked in amazement, then lifted up her hair and discovered that it was! He was overcome with surprise, sadness, and shame, and confessed to his wife everything he had done. She forgave him, and knowing that their love was determined by fate they grew even closer together. They had a son who became a high official, and his mother was rewarded by the emperor. When the city he'd stayed in got to hear of this, they changed the name of the guest house in which he had stayed. They have an "Engagement Hotel" there still, apparently.
Three
'S not a bad story, as far's they go, I reckon. Bu'still, I don' think they'd've been 'appy, d'yo? Things jus' don' seem to 'appen that way fo' me.
When he finished speaking they were near to the turn in the road. He put the book back in his pocket and looked straight ahead, the reins running solidly through his palms. Beside them the water was dashing towards the shore in a riot of seaspray, the sky bending in a white arch to meet the rising land. She looked at his face and saw bones straining through the skin. Then she looked at the road and thought about what he had said. The woman suddenly felt that he was wrong: why shouldn't life, her life, overlap and merge within itself like the feathers in a dovetail? Why should it be fragmentary and awkward and make little sense? Why shouldn't everything meet? She thought of her husband, and she thought of the man; she turned to him and sought out his eyes, joining her own to his deep brown glistening gaze; she gave him her answer.
As they rounded the corner a breaking wave struck the bed of shingle with the sound of nails driving into polished wood. Then they were gone.