so many rockers
moving gently in wind--
empty mailboxes
This is a photo of Thomas Wolfe's childhood home in Asheville, North Carolina. It's been moved several blocks to this location where there's also a small museum honoring the author. The site of all these lonely rocking chairs drew me near.
Thomas Wolfe's father was a stone cutter who also made and inscribed graves. Thomas wrote incredibly long, convoluted novels (Look Homeward, Angel is a famous one) that had to be cut and shaped by his editor, Max Perkins who said that before he met Wolfe he felt a great foreboding.
On this porch, I discovered a real sense of the power of memory. This outer southern living room, now so silent, was once part of a boarding house full of people telling each other stories during summer twilights.
And here's a comment that I came across today about haiku as a wordless poem:
"When I first read Alan Watt's characterization of haiku as "the wordless poem," I thought it was because a haiku had so few words, but now I believe it goes deeper than that (whether Watts intended it so or not). Haiku, for the reader, is wordless because those few words are invisible. We as readers look right through them. There is nothing between us and the moment."
—Cor van den Heuvel, The Haiku Anthology, Third Edition (New York: Norton, 2000), xxix.
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