Today, I sit in midtown, thinking of the heart of poetry, remembering mountains and rivers, and centering on the resonance of haiku. I understand fun haiku, even catku if you will, but I hope for some kind of inspired depth.

A field of mustard,
no whale in sight,
the sea, darkening.

 – Buson, 1716 – 1783

I see many perspectives, different kinds of haiku: W.Va. haiku, big city haiku, morning and evening haiku, ocean haiku, trout stream haiku, deep and shallow, haiku that sketches, haiku like sound that’s so light and peaceful it becomes a floral scent:

The temple bell stops
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.

 – Basho, 1644 – 1694

That’s a Robert Bly translation.  We look inward at our psyche at the same time we, outwardly, become super-aware of where we are.

Elsewhere, Bly writes:
“A poet who writes a short poem is like a man who has found his way through a stone wall into a valley miles long, where he lives. He walks back up the valley, and opens a door in the wall for an instant to show you where the entrance is. The more imaginative readers are able to slip through in the twenty or thirty seconds it takes to read his poem. Those who expect the poet to give them ideas see only a vague movement on the side of the mountain. Before they have turned all the way around to face the poem, the door is closed.”

***

I want to end this meditation very quickly. I’ll hurry on, but first I recall the Chinese priest Hui-k’ai, also known as Wu-men:

The Great Way

The Great Way has no gate;
there are a thousand paths to it.
If you pass through the barrier,
you walk the universe alone.

 – Wu-Men, 1183 – 1260

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