Haibun, summer 2013

August 2013

Haibun

MOVING DAY

Victor P. Gendrano

watching her watch

the remnants of my past life

my daughter whispers

it’s alright Dad to be sad

on your moving out

On my daughter's insistent demand that it's time for me to enjoy my retirement, I moved to a senior community place euphemistically called Leisure World. On the early morning of that first day, I thought I smelt the aroma of a freshly brewed coffee, so half-awake, I hurriedly walked to the kitchen dreamingly half-expecting a homey breakfast with my late wife.

Unfortunately, I accidentally bumped my head on the bedroom’s slightly open door and felt blood oozing from my forehead to my eyes. I sidestepped to the bathroom, snatched a bunch of toilet paper and pressed them tightly over the wound. With my right hand on my forehead, I used my left hand to dial for help.

A paramedic examined the wound and, obviously to lessen the gravity of the situation and put me at ease, he proclaimed with impish grin and studied flair that it was only a cut and no stitches are needed. He then cleaned, dressed and bandaged my head wound, while softly humming a tune.

Blurting repeated thanks while escorting him to the door, I glimpsed a shaft of early morning light gradually piercing and bathing my sleepy neighborhood.

no time nor place

could weaken the memory

of my first love

MARJORIE

claire gardien

On the long summer nights, Scott would walk the left river bank of the Seine. He would fantasize about his first premier role on the boards of a barge he had rented along the river bank. Such was his drive for drama and disclaiming that he eventually strolled there in the morning after breakfast too. Nobody knew but that was that. He would see her there in the shade of the green alders and he would slow down his step. He would perceive her slender ankles down her white chasuble when she bent forward, would notice the finely sculptured bottom of her calves out the loose folds of her dress. The thin line of her emaciated face would arise between light and shadow from under the brim of her straw hat. The bright midday sun would purple her lips. It was a young girl almost frail, but the indentations of her chisel in the stone would show the strength of her wrist. Scott was not able to help himself, and that word would make her shiver like a leaf that got drunk in the breeze, “Marjorie, Marjorie”. Her red hair would turn auburn and her emerald green eyes intense of the message she received.

He would return every day, would slip around her neck a cameo ivory heart as big as an elephant. Over time and their love they would spend the year of their youth on the shore and under the arches of the Pont des Arts passed their years of youth, while she would shape their secrets in the Carrere marble. The theater man had found the gold of Peru.

She would bring green peppers, yellow and red chilies that she crunched for her and for him with her sharp teeth as he spoke to refine the still rough contours of her work. His eyes would drink her sap each time she sipped refreshing drops from her bottle of grenadine. When the weather turned chilly, that the cold wind carried away the umbrella, her hammer rang metallic on the frozen marble. Marjorie exchanged her sneakers of rope against boots and the whereabouts and goings of his minuet on the dock thundered Valkyries. She entered into a deep reflection and other existential questions which Scott did not receiving.

Mauve and purple clouds of autumn took the horizon and the sky got lower on the Seine. Marjorie went on sculpting desperately among the flights of dry leaves. Her chisel almost vertical, she carved two hollow cheeks and the depth of a gaze. Her hammer on the anvil sounded metallic along the banks. The wind rose stronger, the waters of the Seine swelled and roared. Scott’s barge broke its moorings along the river, and was propelled across the bridges. Marjorie clang to the clear translucent eyes of her stone statue, the noisy silence of her sighs. and drowned herself in the wind oaths and dark waters.

Pont des Arts -- the cries of Quasimodo

blurred by a flight of bells

Johannes Manjrekar

1.

Nothing Was Said

Nothing was said, still less understood, but I thought I could read something in her eyes. The girl in the English play was vivacious to the point of tenseness, and I fancied that most of her jokes and wit were aimed in my direction. After the play I never met her again.

Many years later, half-way across the globe, I’m in a car with a school friend. We’ve met after twenty-five years and are catching up on old times. “Do you remember Aarti?” my friend asks. “The dark little girl who would never stop talking?”

Of course I remembered Aarti, I had acted in a play with her once.

“Well, did you know that she was raped and murdered in a park in Delhi?”

I didn’t know and now I have no words. I sit out most of the rest of the ride in silence. Aarti – the girl who would never stop talking.

swishing tyres

a broken white line

divides the road

2.

Mirage Day

The glare off the road is blinding, the heat rising from it stifling. But the big Harappan-looking ox with the huge horns and hump is plodding along stoically, drawing behind it a large rubber-tyred cart piled high with onions that rise to a peak in the middle. A girl, maybe ten years old, is lying on her back on top of the pile, the arch of her body following the contours of the onion hillock. Her mouth is half-open and her eyes wide. The only word I can find for her expression is ecstatic.

mirage day

the pigeon shadows darker

than the tar

A Refusal

Aju Mukhopadhyay

All seats filled up I stood in the middle of the bus which moved through the crowded serpentine roads. Someone was sitting before me I had known before. He looked almost the same except the wrinkles and crow’s-feet developed on his face. As if aware of my presence he looked up once but shied away. After some time the person sitting beside him stood up to vacate the seat. As I decided to occupy it my cousin too got up and without looking at me stepped off the bus. Back home I read that Jean Paul Sartre loathed his childhood.

broken up

Indian joint families

live scattered

Hide & Seek

Ronny Noor

They show up in droves every Saturday morning, from the ancient land of the Incas across the border. Lighting up the small college campus with their colorful dresses, parents, children, and grandmas breathe life into the empty yard with their hearty laughter and Spanish chatter. Exactly on the stroke of ten, the parents troop into classes for an hour of English lesson, while their children frolic under the watchful gaze of two grannies perched on benches across the water-spewing fountain. Standing nearby are a boy and a girl, young teenagers who are laughing at a joke when he brings his mouth close to her ear and whispers. Flushed, she throws a glance at the granny to her left. He tries to pat her glowing cheek; she slaps him away. As the boy wheels around at the hoopla in the distance, the girl takes off, her white blouse with pink and green floral pattern around the neck shimmering in the sun above the long blue skirt. Not seeing her when he turns his head, the boy circles the fountain, crying, “Alma! Alma!” Then he peeks behind the benches in vain and dashes to the right, all the way to the corner of the building, and there! He sees her leaning behind the century-old sprawling tree. As their eyes meet, she bursts into smiles, hands reaching out.

stealing kisses

behind the old pecan tree

first love

Petroglyph National Monument

Bruce Ross

Clear day moon. A corn plant is growing out of a zoomorphic creature's back. Not minding the dry heat, entranced at each new wonder like this whale-like being with a line connecting the corn plant image to its huge dark eye. As if a climax near the long trail's end a natural amphitheater gallery, a curve in the mountain range, and centered high in the curve, like a featured painting, layers of large bright hand prints. On a second look hidden within an indentation in the mountain rock far to the right and at arms height very old, almost faded, similarly grouped prints. On returning back down the trail stopping one last time to meditate on what was once meditated on here. Drawn, as it were, completely into it and into a haunting sound from atop the gallery.

the roadrunner's cooing

through ancient hand prints

a desert wind

WINDOW OBSERVATIONS FROM A CAFÉ IN NYACK, NY

Adelaide B. Shaw

A Bohemian river town, home to artists, writers, musicians, yoga practitioners, herbologists and palm readers. There are cigar stores, juice bars, coffee bars and pubs.

The town attracts visitors all year round for its river views, antique shops, good restaurants and local color.

The sidewalk in front of the café is a popular meeting place. Tourists with their ice-cream cones and cameras; dog walkers with three or four canines in tow; cyclists in day-glow spandex and bearded men in tie-dye shirts and cow-boy hats; men and women in conservative gray carrying brief cases; mommies pushing strollers and young girls with bare midriffs and combat boots.

It is a town which welcomes the resurrected and newly born, aging hippies and new age philosophers, the firm believers and showmen.

soft winds

a different shape

to each cloud

HURRICANE

The next morning, after a thrashing and soaking, the drying out period begins. We put away all the supplies we needed while the power was out: flashlights, candles, portable radio, bottled water, fondue burner. I toss out what defrosted food is suspect and cook up what can be saved. We clean up the yard.

a bird’s nest

blown from somewhere

to here

LOW TIDE

I scramble over exposed rocks. Slippery moss and sharp edges make it difficult. Tide pools here and there, between crevices and in the hollows of dish shaped rocks. Some empty, some occupied. Sea anemone, starfish, crabs. Salt and the odor of seaweed in the breeze. Splashes of cold spray and sea foam.

lunching alone

gulls and sandpipers

search the beach

Anita Virgil

AND THE RAINS CAME

Normally, itadakimasu [ I accept, I eat ] what each day brings. Fear is no preoccupation. So neither Hell nor Heaven governs my behavior. The dead are part of the soil. Or, if consigned to ashes, minute particles rising in air to seed a raindrop. For me the dead pose no occult hauntings. Only memories of every stripe that crop up intermittently with sensory reminders through the years.

Other than an underlying malaise at the madness infecting much of humankind, and the recognition of how utterly insignificant I am compared with our planet’s awesome processes, my days unfold at a steady pace. Concerns from A to Z resolved as required. Panic is foreign. Until last night as I slept. A thundercrack so loud I felt it in my chest . . . I could not move. Wild-eyed I lay in atavistic terror. This once I could believe in anything !

Yet so many other days and nights this wet season--it has rained. All kinds of ways. Early evening’s muffled rumbles that go on and on like clumsy furniture-movers overhead, then depart with no rain after all. Grayness merely darkens into night. There are thunderclaps that startle, bring excited windswirls followed by a soothing rush of rain. Coolness.

after the storm

the widows pick up

fallen branches

Sometimes, there’s the drama and beauty of night lightning -- lightning so near, so bright, I sense it in sleep through shut eyelids. Count one thousand two thousand three thousand four BOOM goes the thunder--four miles off. Even when there are bad ones, I still can go back and rain-dream. . .

Then come the days with long dreary mornings of quiet rainfall. Other times, even as the sun shines, quick little showers spatter down. This road wet. That one not. Or mightily it will develop as the heat builds towards sundown and the clouds mound high as castle towers. Ice crystals form around rising water vapor molecules or dust, or an ice-making bacterium, invisible though everywhere, compounds the event: freezes a single particle of drifting moisture, meets, freezes another and another--makes a snowflake. By accretion, it reaches critical mass. Falls through warmer air, becomes a single raindrop. And a new cycle begins.

One day, powerful whooshing gusts of wind suddenly blow in. The sun disappears. The sky glares sickly yellow-gray. In no time a severe storm hits. The weather channel frantically beeps “. . . winds of 70 miles per hour. . . heading east. . . take cover. “ Methodically, I shut the windows, draw a couple of basins of water, fill the kettle for drinking water, get the flashlight. (Candles and matches always ready in every room.) Done, I settle down to watch the enormous trees whip madly left and right, swirl in wide arcs just before the downpour. Hoping the tree roots hold fast. Distant thunder rumbles. Closes in. Branches and leaves rip from the trees, flying everywhere. Predictably, power lines are downed.

Now a single candle barely lights the dark kitchen. Flashlight in hand and a chair moved to an inner hall, I sit and read. After an hour or more, the furor outside lessens. But I’ve grown hungry. Poke about the shadowy cupboards for food, retrieve a jar of baked beans. Whimsically serve them on an old red enamel tin plate, pour out cold breakfast coffee into a bright green enamel tin cup -- both from camping days, and grab a chunk of bread. Cowboy fare. I am briefly transported--hodgepodge fashion--to another place and time: out on the dusty range by the chuck wagon. Imagining the huge “Lazy B” ranch (Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s homestead. It ran from southwest New Mexico into Eastern Arizona). With a Nathan Lane/John Wayne walk, I head out for the living room, hunker down to watch the storm through the bank of blurry casement windows. The fireplace, cleared of charred logs and ash after winter use, fills the closed room with its pungent smell. Perfects my scenario.

Belly full. Content. Evening approaches. The storm moves northeast.

far away the thunder now . . .

drenched

summer fields 1

The sky slowly brightens. The eaves drip. A hummingbird sails in for a drink at the feeder. The other birds return from their safe places to feed. A little rabbit ventures into the grass from his hideaway.

And the furtive chipmunk inches out from the rocks around the pond to join the soggy evening dinner hour.

a glow edges the clouds . . .

I munch mint leaves

picked in a sunny hour

Powerless, the house is dark. The digital clock faces are black. But the Seth Thomas wind-ups with their brass pendulums keep ticking all the hours into another century. I light three bedroom candles. By them I read my way into sleep.

NOTES

Photos :

“Sunlight in Evaporation From Sea” Wikimedia Commons