Haibun, Dec 2012

December 2012

Haibun Selection

The Ocean Begins Outside

By Patricia Prime & Owen Bullock

It was a cold, sunny, winter’s day in Wellington. Early-morning joggers pounded the waterfront, their breath steaming in the air. There were cyclists too, children perched on the crossbars of their father’s bikes, several children on trikes, skateboards or scooters. None of them paid any attention to the figures walking along the pavement from Te Papa, beside the shiny blue water of the harbour. A man and two women, he with long strides, wearing sunglasses, a thick shapeless sweater and woollen mittens; one of the women hobbling along with the aid of a walking stick, the other young and fit, with curly black hair, a fashionable beret and a red scarf.

They walked for about twenty minutes, ignoring the strident bells of cyclists, who were forced to swerve in order to pass them. They reached a small white catering van parked beside the road. The man politely requested lattes from the woman behind the serving hatch. He handed the cardboard cups to the women, took a sip of his own and said, “Let’s sit over here.”

a penguin

waddles up the beach

towards its nest

the gull

looks left & right

as it eases upwards

a dog

on the beach, barking

like a seal

a black-backed gull

statuesque

on the harbour marker

for the ball dog runs across the sky

Fire

By Steven Carter

The yellow quarter-moon, a twist of lemon in a brandy-colored sky, rises early and sets early.

Brandy-colored: There’s a forest fire thirty miles southeast of here, up in the “Bob”—the Bob Marshall Wilderness of western Montana.

He was a wonderful man, six-foot-six, a true conservationist as opposed to contemporary tree-huggers, so many of whom—pests impervious to bark—haunt these mountains. On his way by train toWashington intent on arguing for more acreage devoted to the wild,Marshall died, age 38, of a heart attack.

Well, Bob’s Rockies are also haunted by the ghosts of Lewis and Clark who came through here to discover the non-existent Northwest Passage, and to find—or was it to lose?—themselves.

Is there a difference?

. . . The fire can be seen from Holland Lake just south. Becalmed in a rowboat, looking at reflections of the Swan range, you find yourself in a topsy-turvy world, mountains hanging like stalactites pointing to the center of the earth, where Native Americans believed an earth-goddess dwelled.

A fish jumps, and the stalactites shimmer—no, shatter—and I’m left alone, emptied of everything but the grieving beauty of a Montana twilight; tinged reddish-orange now by the fire.

shaman songs—

sailing to Paradise

all the summer moons

Silver loneliness

The death that young men hope for—

The sun ticks down the sky; easy to forget it’s the same sun that bronzed half-naked Blackfoot warriors in the days of Lewis and Clark. Long before them, 100,000 full moons ago, it was already hard at work melting the ice dam of nearby glacial Lake Missoula, just enough to midwife a 300-foot-high mega-flood racing at 70 mph to the Pacific.

Now, as we speak, the air is much colder. Twilight’s amethyst skies—

. . . Next day the lake blooms with morning light, pale yellows and pinks of reflected clouds reminding me of peach-blossoms. For some reason this notion pops into my head:

Not to respect death—to believe, for instance, that the next world is preferable to ours, serving up free lunches of peaches and lime sherbet—is a secular sin. Love is the sole medicine against death, a philosopher writes, for love is death’s brother.

Well? Isn’t the vaccine made from the virus?

(As I write this I watch two ospreys gyring above the lake: I “fit” my gaze to them, as if into a light-socket, and the Big Sky vanishes for that moment. Wings tipped with silver light, the birds look for fish before returning to their perches made for them atop power poles by the Electric Company.)

between two yellow leaves

a sliver of light—

enough room for a poem

& nbsp;

Quantum physicists assure us, of course, that everything I’m looking at is an illusion, a magician’s cloak concealing hadrons, leptons, quarks brimming with strangeness, color, and charm. . .

Crane Mountain—

somehow from a dead birch

a new leaf

I too am in Arcadia

By Steven Carter

No exaggeration—she’s Elizabeth Taylor beautiful: a small-town Montana girl, now in her 40’s, ripe but not overripe, married with two kids, a dutiful daughter to her parents in the rest home, both with dementia.

“Feel my bicep,” she whispers to me. Small, shapely, tanned: and hard as a rock. “It’s the gym,” she explains. “100 pull-ups a day: or till I’m exhausted. . .”

On the word “exhausted” she lowers her glance.

Something in those eyes—not violet, like Liz Taylor’s, but a rich, faraway blue, expressive of places she’ll never see—and mountains tumbling over each other like rambunctious kids to infinity.

Infinity! That word keeps popping into my head as we chat, even though there’s nothing particularly erotic about endlessness.

. . . .Now and then she touches my arm for emphasis as women will do to men, never to each other.

Meanwhile John, her husband sitting on her other side—perfectly nice guy, good guy, what used to be called a good provider— gazes into space: but only the space extending between him and the dingy west wall of the restaurant, hiding a big Montana sky—

A sky beyond tears: beyond longing: beyond the distances of sleep—

ashen day moon

Canadian geese—

a dream of islands

Soft murder

By Steven Carter

She’ll ask you—no, beg you—to take her back, I suggest to Phil.When she does, my nickel’s worth of free advice is—

Amid so much beauty—the lake, the mountains, cloudscapes carved by the wings of ospreys, hawks, and eagles—so much restlessness and unhappiness: the summer(s) of our discontent.

mid-summer dusk

lovelier in shadow—

morning glories

Well, not everyone’s. There’s a delightful couple a few houses south of us, married nearly fifty years, with kids and grandkids, the whole eight-and-a-half yards. (The missing half-yard: health issues for both of them).

She, Frieda, was a child of the Sudetenland, the present-day Czech Republic, when Hitler decided he wanted it for a birthday present. After signing the Munich agreement consigning Frieda, her family, and thousands of others to the oblivion of an unknown future, Hitler said of the appeaser Neville Chamberlain: “He was such a nice old man I decided to give him my autograph.”

—What was it Flaubert said? Right now there’s an Emma Bovary suffering in dozens of small towns throughout France.

So here, in 2012, the usual mixed bag of small town (or village) personalities, dreams, and destinies: Phil’s wife, looks starting to go at age 43, who wants to play, never mind a twenty-five year marriage with two kids; Frieda, who still teases her husband she’ll have an affair if he doesn’t clean out the attic; and the others: curmudgeonly 80-year-old Joan, who likes to shoot squirrels: Mary Ann, another restless one, who complains that her husband is nothing but a little brother, and who loves to kill elk with a bow and arrow; 82-year-old Don, my neighbor, who drove big rigs for forty years rather than work the family farm with his worthless older brother; John and Minnie, Phil’s in-laws who are secretly on his side, not their own daughter’s. . .

Yes, like the Big Sky reflected in a single drop of rainwater, the human universe is captured in Swan Village: in winter a snow globe of dreams become nightmares, nightmares become dreams.

And yet, most evenings winter and summer: priestly benedictions from the sky: a laying-on of hands of yellows and purples until the order comes down—

Fade to black.

no yellow leaves—

no chill—

still, somehow, autumn

Fatal tide

By Claire Gardien

Frightened by the turmoil of the splashing waves and the overall turmoil, the three years old has run away from the seawater. There she runs as speedily as she can on the wet hard sand to the dry sand where the grand-parents are sitting.

“I howl out too, “Come back now, come back!”

She is so small, but she grasps the sand with her toes so tight you could say she has much gust training at something. Or, would-she escape? She is having a hard time fighting with some demons she does not even know, or? The space itself is so large it could swallow the little thing like a sand particle engulfed in a tornado. A rock wave licks her feet and she runs harder, harder to the dry sand where our grand-parents are sitting.

Right or left, the sand opens on the horizon, right or left she has to fight with the yoke of the unreadable open spaces. Her rhythm gets tougher, her knees, ankles and elbows now well aligned in her race are significant of a better momentum for such a little creature to master her race. She gets sturdy as a long-distance runner. This is a low tide beach though, even if you would nicely think she is smelling a plate of fresh oats;

On the left, bells are tinkling clear in the wind. This is the afternoon donkey cart jog trotting its august tourists. They move right to left and left to right their umbrellas trying to get her attention. She races on, confident in her navy blue short and tee. It was just a fatally unconscious escape she couldn’t manage at all. The donkey muzzle almost engulfed her neck while touching her blond hair. Grandpa and Grandma did not know how to cope with the little one’s cheek. They just tried to have her paddling in the shallow puddles and that was not successful. That was of no avail.

sandals -- the days to come assuredly

safe