A Sequence out of Season

ON THE CUSP OF THE SOLSTICE

how quiet
the quiet before
winter dawn

first snowfall
the neighborhood runner
walks in tights

six crows
silent in a snowy field—
noon whistle

nickel-sized snowflakes
old man at the bus stop
wearing one glove

past midnight
can’t stay indoors
when the barred owl calls

not so close
small skunk
running in the road

winter sky-watching
sycamore branch divides
one star in two

Haikuists like many artists often focus on the same subject over and over. The Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa wrote nearly 200 haiku about frogs. Maybe he lived right next to a pond. Perhaps, they kept him awake on those long spring nights (when we lived in Berkeley, the spring frog chorus was so loud that the sound seemed to pulse inside my body.) For Issa maybe watching those big bullfrogs leap into water just filled him with so much joy that he had to share it.

I find myself writing about celestial events a lot. Most nights, I begin walking my dog at dusk; by the time we're homeward bound, usually the stars or moon have appeared. This last month has been conjunction-heaven, excuse the pun. Venus and Jupiter put on a grand show, now Venus and the moon are hard at linking in the western sky.

And speaking of linking, this is my first published sequence of haiku. It appeared in LYNX: A Journal for Linking Poets XXVII:1,
February, 2012