Magnapoets Japanese Form

Our first meeting in Moscow was not easy. After breakfast, Valeria went to work and left us sitting in the kitchen. Natalia doesn't speak Italian neither English: only Russian… so we stayed there glancing at each other, in silence, without saying a word. nevertheless I am at ease even not knowing why, and I relax.

Suddenly the turtle in the aquarium plunges into the water and we both turn to look at it.  I stand up to get a better look on the turtle and to stretch my legs a bit. Natalia follows me.

"in Italian we call it TARTARUGA", I say to Natalia. She smiles and repeats like enjoying the word "TAR-TA-RU-GA"

[…]

I was surprised when before leaving she told me in English: "Hope to see you soon…" Smiling, I replied: "Oh! I hope the same!"

   pizza for dinner--
   my mother-in-law tries
   to speak Italian

Piggybacking off of Curt's fine haibun, this is a true story about a close friend of mine, Jesse McKinney.  He died nearly 10 years ago.

Left Hand Man

He was only 22, but for many of those who knew him it was no surprise that his life came to an early end.  Just days before his death, the two of us sat beneath a sky as dark as any I have ever seen.  There was no moon and there were no stars.  It was here that he wrote his first and only poem.  The writing was hardly legible when brought into the light, but he made it crystal clear that he thought of himself as the Devil's left hand man.  When I heard the news that he left us, I wasn't surprised.  Ultimately, when faced with the complexities that define life, he simply walked away.

morning sunlight —
an unfinished game
still on the chessboard

Contemporary Haibun Online vol 2 no 3

Cold Snap

He appears nervous, shifting his weight on one leg, then the other, as he informs me that he doesn't feel well and he's going home. He hands me his task list, turns around, and clocks out. I note that all of the work on the list has been completed early, which means he probably didn't take a morning or lunch break. I start to call after him, to ask if there is something wrong, but a moment of hesitation silences my question. It's none of my business if he wants to take the remainder of the day off; I've been thinking about taking a day or two myself.

The next morning a couple of maintenance workers find him slumped behind the steering wheel of his car in a parking lot near the coroner's office. Despite the lack of a note and no history of suicidal tendencies, his death is ruled "self-inflicted."

crack of a stick
underfoot —
killer frost

previously published in Haibun Today

Smoke

It's pitch black out here as we stand on the porch at the back of my house.  The flare of light from his cigarette burns away a bit of the darkness, and I am compelled to ask him, "Why do you smoke so much? Aren't you worried that you're killing yourself?".  Laughing, he tells me that he smokes because he doesn't want anyone else to take credit for his death.

hellfire sermon —
catching the breeze
from a paper fan

previously published in Frogpond XXXI:1

The way from Indira Gandhi International Airport to New Dehli center is a nightmare. After twenty days of work in Little Tibet, it’s not easy to confront crowds, heavy pollution and carcasses of dead cows at the margins of the road... The taxi carries my collegue and I to the Imperial Hotel in the central district of the megalopolis. A room is waiting for us before tomorrow's flight for Italy. The immense hotel imposes itself with all  its colonial glamour and once entered we plunge into the conditioned air and the warmest welcome of the Indian staff. It's clear at the first sight that this is one of the most luxurious hotels in India.

All the staff in reception speak PERFECT English, and after long weeks in Ladakh, where we communicated in broken English, I work hard to follow their speech.  Our room feels like a mini apartment: Firstly I phone to my mother in Italy directly from the room, then watch satelite TV and  call the hotel's laundry service.  Unlike the staff of reception, no one speaks good English there... the only phrases they know are "you are welcome" and "thank you Sir" when receiving the tip.

For the bathroom I have precise agreements with my travel companion: first I wash myself, and I have permission to stay all the time I want... and then it's his turn  (guessing he will stay a lot of hours!).  Absolute cleanliness reigns inside of our room: there's not a speck of dust... while I'm having the bath I recall that in Leh, for washing, we used a basin of water with a pitcher... When I leave the bathroom and pass the turn to my collegue, I decide to order something to eat in room and then try to understand the secret of this absolute cleanliness. And then I realize: the windows are sealed...
welded.

Dehli sunset;
over the rusty hovels
the Imperial Hotel

(from my book "Ten Little Haibuns" and previously published on Chrysanthemum#2)

"...What is this? Something's been broken?" my russian wife asks me... "in some way yes, several years ago... it was a present from Roberto" I answer. Roberto went to find his sister in Germany that November. I don't remember if she was living in Munich or in Berlin, but the events attracted him inexorably to Berlin. Roberto and I were schoolfriends. I don't remember my state of mind... I was 16, stuck in front of the TV set as all of us in Italy and in the rest of the world were. But as I look at these coloured pieces, found some days ago in a forgotten box, lots of thoughts crowd my mind: if that wall dividing Europe and the world still existed, would I have ever met my wife?

 

leaves fall in Berlin--
my friend souvenirs
Wall splinters

(Published on Chrysanthemum#2)

The pendulum swings back to the side of war.  Has it ever really left?  Do anthropologists have an example of a thriving culture that never resorted to state sanctioned killing?

deer season
the ricochet of gunfire
from a TV set

previously published in Frogpond XXX:1, winter 2007

bad for the gander   

    She had me up at sunrise making “Save the Geese” signs.  This must be penance for ogling that waitress with the great legs last weekend.   Instead of picnicking, we’re spending a hot and humid Memorial Day on a picket line, on about the only shadeless stretch of road in the Village of Scotia, New York.

       

    Back in 1989, a pair of Canadian geese were brought from a state game farm to our nature preserve.  As the flock grew, we’d bring the kids to see them on Collins Lake — sitting on that knoll that’s covered in bird shit today.  “Which ones are coming, Daddy?” . . . ”Which are going?” . . . ”Which ones live here?”    By now, almost two hundred of them are considered “resident birds,” staying until the 50-acre Lake is frozen and coming back in the Spring.               

bathtub spider

she wants it caught

and brought outside

    Most Scotians love the idea of hosting those honking immigrants, but there’s so much goose excrement around Collins Park, no one wants their children to play here, and the Lake and beach had to be closed last summer.  Still, the Wife and her Geese-Savers want to stop Mayor McLaughlin from euthanizing part of the flock. They say it’s inhumane and he hasn’t tried hard enough the past ten years to use nonlethal methods — like border collies and noise-makers, and the always-mysterious “egg-addling”.
         
     Except for that one guy with the graying pony tail and Birkenstocks, who keeps trying to start those lame cheers, every male on this line — from 8 to 80 — looks dispirited, drafted, drug-here.    It wasn’t enough that I gave up hunting geese years ago, to please her and the kids.   Now I’m spending a perfectly good holiday baking my buns on the pavement, not grilling burgers in the backyard.   Her crusade has become mine.   

at my pond

the geese you shooed

from your pond

   There is one consolation: my sweaty face and ”Kinky Friedman” t-shirt embarrass the crap out of her.             

   

bathroom cricket -

a spider spirals
down the drain  

- original version posted May 31, 2006 at f/k/a by the short-lived Haibun Pundit - 

silly woman

Such a silly woman.  I just had to change my dress before he drove baby-and-me to the hospital.  As if maternity nurses never saw hemorrhaging or a bloody skirt.  “I’ll be right back, Dear,” I promised, as I stepped off the curb and hurried to the house.  Never said how dizzy I felt.
      
Such a silly man.  Herbert did a little eye-roll, but didn’t argue with a woman going into labor.  When I collapsed onto the street behind our old car, he saw that gray Buick sedan passing by — with the license number he got almost right — and thought “hit-’n'-run.” Over and over, he yelled “Call 911! Call 911!” to everyone, and no one, his tears wetting my face.       
      
Silly police.  Hours of roadblocks and interviews.  On the tv news, neighbors outraged over a ”black driver” who would knock down a full-term, pregnant woman and keep on going.  All the neighbors say I was ”a very nice woman.”    
   
Silly Medical Examiner.  It took him a day to figure it out.  “The cause of death was not consistent with injuries being struck by a motor vehicle,” said Amsterdam Chief Thomas Brownall. I fell backwards at the same time the vehicle was going by.  "Fell backwards, struck her head and died of those injuries.”

Such a silly mother: They did a C-section, but my baby was dead. They examined the gray car and it never hit any body.  When I got to the hospital, my clothes had more rusty splotches.   I can hear my mother wailing in Uganda.  Such a silly woman.            
            

    midnight fire alarm –
    stumbling toward
    the wedding album

["based on a true story": “Amsterdam Woman’s Death Not Caused by Hit and Run,” WNYT.com, Albany, NY, May 27, 2006 .  My first haibun.]

Nice to see Aurora's tanka and Ildi's on haystacks. Wonderful photo! Here's a piece I'm just writing having viewed a number of fields with these cake-like haystacks last weekend. Suggestions/Comments always welcome.
Ray

Haystacks

The haystacks of my boyhood were rectangular bundles, small enough to load by hand on the back of a pickup. There was an intimacy in working with them--the smell of cut grass, the rhythm of lifting and stacking, sweat stinging the eyes, the itch caused by the rough edges, an ice tinkling jug of lemonade at midday break.

Monet's haystacks series, done in rich pastels, represents the play of light at different times and seasons in the fields of his time. While no people are shown, so infused with the human are these images that one easily imagines farmhands scything the grass, forking it into yurt-like piles, cowlicks in their tousled hair, stopping occasionally to munch bread and cheese and to guzzle home brewed beer. 

Today, haystacks are rolls that resemble large golden cakes randomly strewn about the freshly mown fields. There's the same fragrance, but the land has the surrealistic look of a production line, absent of humans, as if the fields have been plundered rather than caressed. 

In one, long lines of bales are wrapped in white plastic, like sausages for a race of giants. I imagine Grant Wood's American Gothic, but without the pitchfork, the house, ultra modern, the wife's countenance, dour, as she puts everything in its right place at the dinner table, the family sitting as if at attention, the talk sanitized, a glass of buttermilk beside each plate. 

sunset
red plastic flowers 
on the war memorial

or

garage cleaning day
a thick layer of dust
on the canning jars

supermarket muzak
garden herbs in
plastic containers