Gritting of teeth over defining haiku

The following is a rant in response 

to the notion of defining haiku.

It is jazz-riff-rhetoric

that teases its theme rather that polish 

the brass door-plates of convention.

Zen Zen Zen!

the monks motorbike   

revs up

On one hand I am irritated with efforts to define haiku.

That means kill the butterfly, shove a pin through its abdomen and put the dead beauty in a museum display case.

On the other hand I have a most beautiful butterfly sitting on my bookshelf.

No formaldehyde or such preservative, so the throrax and abdomen have been eaten away, leaving a gap like some monstrous vagina.

To praise a gruesome image (lets make pacts with the dark things inside us – after all it is the shadows that give form to colour) it means my butterfly cannot now be pinned down.

And to return to the lines in the palm of the hand, they do speak of the bones and muscles underneath, and even speak of the embryo’s first clutching.

My perspective is not so much any belief in being able to convey the butterflyness of the butterfly. My case is that artifacts are a state of mind,

And artifacts may be eaten away like my butterfly.

& so to my non-definition of haiku:

Haiku are a deep faith in language, ritualized in brevity, a belief that the omissions of brevity can contain more than is said, a desperate and joyous attempt to convey the felt in what is seen. Despite their supposed expression of here & now, what you don’t see is what you get. How much of
that is the knotting of our delusions is an inextricable conundrum.

Each haiku is a small anxiety – a hope that connection at a distance is real

cycling
into the motorbikes
backfire

 

Between Words

http://www.modernenglishtanka.com/vol3/MET11_final.html

Turn to page 216.

Dictum

I almost tell the truth

but the words are a little crazy.

I almost tell you I'm crazy

but the words are a little truth.

I tell you the truth is crazy,

well almost,

but the words are little.

Day  6 napowrimo 2009

Sleep - (A tanka)

the cat settles,

curls on the book

open on my lap

Hubble photos of galaxies

the light of blue stars

Day 5: napowrimo 2009

The Weight

there is no blood or keen pain

there are no stigmata pierced by the name of god

my teeth are heavy in the clench of coffee

the weight of weariness is a sandbag barricade

raised heavy on the levee of my cheekbones

my new lens prescription is Hubble without the fix

my new boarder, arthritis, wants to snap my wrist

birthday candles are getting to be a fire risk 

but I'll light them, and wait for the paramedics

to rescue me from the inferno. mostly I want,

want the electric paddles to sizzle through the dark hum

dull as an amplifier cranked up without music 

Let the two hundred . . . clear!    shock of words

three hundred . . . clear! sputter back the pilot light

of hope

Poem 3: napowrimo 2009

The Story in Her Face

Her high cheekbones round as Golgotha

swept clean of suffering, were pinched ruddy

as a child. The light diffused there, today

remains immaculate. Every soul she sees seems

already a a ghost. One would fall

right through a hug, and laugh, or pose.

"Mr Sullen!" How she got the sepia in her voice

is a mystery. But it sounds like it was made

for the shape of her mouth. Hear High German.

Her child flies in the kitchen door full of the fire

that will burn him out. Her mouth is a horizon

seismic at the periphery, seismic with something

yellow. "How deep is that in the flower my tart-sweet?"

"Mama, it is as deep as the water in the old mill stream."

She kneads dough that is already risen,

baked golden. She tastes a palm-rolled ball of that,

because it can rise to the size of the world.

It expands from her palate. Like lens flare it glows

around every thought in her head. Death is less

tangible, at the corner of that.

Her sulllen child is posed on a chair.

She stands behind. He is a hollow space

consumed by the future. You can reach

right through him and touch the why

that is there when he dies.

In pencil on the back of the photo: (Aunty Mary's) 

daughter & grandson died Jan 1922

Horse Tale

 a wild horse

galloping toward me 

granddad’s fingers 

The mantle clock chimes as if it were an omen in a fairy tale. The opening notes of as slow waltz. Blue notes. How beautifully the mermaid dances on pain made out of daggers. How the tin soldier’s lead heart is heavy as ammunition. How the beanstalk winds toward heaven lithe as smoke from a smelter’s chimney. How I listen as my fingers gallop toward my granddaughter, off the table and on out the window. Outside the almost laughter of a kookaburra, the supernatural quardle of magpies and her answering the “h h h oo” welling from the hearts of the doves.

This haibun is from "Four Tellings" a trans-Tasman haibun sequence written by Owen Bullock, Beverley George, Jeffrey Harpeng and Joanna Preston. This collection treats haibun as links in a renga-like sequence. It has also been posted on Haibun Today where "Four Tellings" has also been reviewed by Patricia Prime.

Old Spark

Twenty k from somewhere no longer there,

at least, that is, not the place it once was,

in a garden a heart-fall from Eden,

a comely lass. Well, that’s one summation.

Her photo is peppered with age. With care

her image has outlived her. Now, moss

would smudge her name if any stone stood ten

decades, two wars, three regimes. Elation

 

and none of that, she’s a frayed thread. A glare

on the sodden mound behind her infers

at earth’s roll through space, a mill wheel grinding.

Face on a postcard, is grandfather there,

a bookmark, now unnamed  in old papers? 

He is just an old spark still igniting.

Box Brownie Sky

My father is on the roof and I am

sleeping in my cot. Just a hint of cloud

in the off-white sky. He is looking east

or north toward where he was, is, is not

My father is on the roof and i am

in some room awaiting a name: a cloud

of possibles. My name is to the east

or north. One word at a time. The whole lot

are in closed books. A corrugated roof

offers father as a word. His toolbox

explains. On a closer shed roof barbed-wire,

a hand-split timber fence below. The roof-

line has two words, father and his toolbox.

Overhead one cloud, and below barbed-wire.