Haibun

Haibun
	 
Wanting to write something I could think only of my ideas, though you surely have your
separate, private being in some place I will never walk through.  And then of the dismal
space between us, filled though it may be with interesting objects, standing around like
trees waiting to be discovered.  It may be that this is the intellectual world.  But if so,
what poverty—even the discoveries yet to be made, and which shall surprise us, even us. 
It must be heightened somehow, but not to brutality.  That is an invention and not a true
instinct, and this must never be invented.  Yet I am forced to invent, even if during the
process I become a songe-creux, inaccurate dreamer, and these inventions are then to be
claimed by the first person who happens on them.  I’m hoping that homosexuals not yet
born get to inquire about it, inspect the whole random collection as though it were a
sphere.  Isn’t the point of pain the possibility it brings of being able to get along without
pain, for awhile of manipulating our marionette-like limbs in the strait-jacket of air, and
so to have written something?  Unprofitable shifts of light and dark in the winter sky
address this dilemma very directly.  In time to come we shall perceive them as the
rumpled linen or scenery through which we did walk once, for a short time, during some
sort of vacation.  It is a frostbitten, brittle world but once you are inside it you want to
stay there always.
The year—not yet abandoned but a living husk, a lesson
	 
Haibun 2
	 
…and can see the many hidden ways merit drains out of the established and
internationally acclaimed containers, like a dry patch of sky.  It is an affair of some
enormity.  The sky is swathed in a rich, gloomy and finally silly grandeur, like drapery
in a portrait by Lebrun.  This is to indicate that our actions in this tiny, tragic platform are
going to be more than usually infinitesimal, given the superhuman scale on which we
have to operate, and also that we should not take any comfort from the inanity of our
situation; and we are still valid creatures with a job to perform, and the arena facing us,
though titanic, hasn’t rolled itself beyond the notion of dimension.  It isn’t suitable, and
it’s here.  Shadows are thrown out at the base of things at right angles to the regular
shadows that are already there, pointing in the correct direction.  They are faint but not
invisible, and it seems appropriate to start intoning the litany of dimensions there, at the
base of a sapling spreading its lines in two directions.  The temperature hardens, and
things like the smell and the mood of water are suddenly more acute, and may help us. 
We will never know whether they did.
Water, a bossa nova, a cello is centred, the light behind the library.
	 
Haibun 3
	 
I was swimming with the water at my back, funny thing is it was real this time.  I mean
this time it was working.  We weren’t too far from shore, the guides hadn’t noticed yet. 
Always you work out of the possibility of being injured, but this time, all the new 
construction, the new humiliation, you have to see it.  Guess it’s OK to take a look.  But a
cup of tea—you wouldn’t want to spill it.  And a grapefruit (spelled “grapefruit” on the
small, painstakingly lettered card) after a while, and the new gray suit.  Then more, and
more, it was a kind of foliage or some built-in device to trip you.  Make you fall.  The
encounter with the silence of permissiveness stretching away like a moonlit sea to the
horizon, whatever that really is.  They want you to like it.  And you honor them in liking
it.  You cause pleasure before sleep insists, draws over to where you may yet be.  And
some believe this is merely a detail.  And they may be right.  And we may be the whole
of which all that truly happens in only peelings and shreds of bark.  Not that we are too
much more than these.  Remember they don’t have to thank you for it either.
The subtracted sum, all I’m going by here, with the boy, this new maneuver is less than
the letter in the wind.
	 
Haibun 4
	 
Dark at four again.  Sadly I negotiate the almost identical streets as little by little they are
obliterated under a rain of drips and squiggles of light.  Their message of universal
brotherhood through suffering is taken from the top, the pedal held down so that the first
note echoes throughout the piece without becoming exactly audible.  It collects over
different parts of the city and the drift in those designated parts is different from
elsewhere.  It is a man with the conscience of a woman, always coming out of something,
turning to look at you, wondering about a possible reward.  How sweet to my sorrow is
this man’s knowledge in his way of coming, the brotherhood that will surely result under
now darkened skies.
The pressing, pressing urgent whispers, pushing on, seeing directly
	 
Haibun 5
	 
Bring them all back to life, with white gloves on, out of the dream in which they are still
alive.  Loosen the adhesive bonds that tie them to the stereotypes of the dead, clichés like
the sound of running water.  Abruptly it was winter again.  A slope several football fields
wide sprang out of the invisible foreground, the one behind me, and unlaced its barren
provocation upwards, with flare and menace, at a 20-degree angle—the ascending night
and also the voice in it that means to be heard, a pagoda of which is visible at the left
horizon, not meaning much: the flurry of a cold wind.  We’re in it too chortled the
rowanberries.  And how fast so much aggressiveness unfolded, like a swiftly flowing,
silent stream.  Along its banks world history presented itself as a series of translucent
tableaux, fading imperceptibly into one another, so that the taking of Quebec by the
British in 1629 melts into the lollipop tints of Marquette and Joliet crossing the mouth of
the Missouri River.  But at the center a rope of distress twists itself ever tighter around
some of the possessions we brought from the old place and were going to arrange here. 
And what about the courteous but dispassionate gaze of an armed messenger on his way
from someplace to someplace else that is the speech of all the old, resurrected loves,
tinged with respect, caring to see that you are no longer alone now in this dream you
chose.  The dark yellowish flow of light drains out of the slanted dish of the sky and from
the masses of the loved a tremendous chant arises: We are viable!  And so back into
the city with its glimmers of possibility like Broadway nights of notoriety and the warm
syrup of embarrassed and insistent proclamations of all kinds of tidings that made you
what you were in the world and made the world for you, only diminished it once it had
been seen and become the object of further speculation leading like railroad ties out of
the present inconclusive sphere into the world of two dimensions.
A terminus, pole fringed with seaweed at its base, a cracked memory
	 
Haibun 6
	 
To be involved in every phase of directing, acting, producing and so on must be infinitely
rewarding.  Just as when a large, fat, lazy frog hops off his lily pad like a spitball
propelled by a rubber band and disappears into the water of the pond with an enthusiastic
plop.  It cannot be either changed or improved on.  So too with many of life’s little less-
than-pleasurable experiences, like the rain that falls and falls for so long that no one can
remember when it began or what weather used to be, or cares much either; they are much
too busy trying to plug holes in ceilings or emptying pails and other containers and then
quickly pushing them back to catch the overflow.  But nobody seems eager to accord
ideal status to this situation and I, for one, would love to know why.  Don’t we realize
that after all these centuries that are now starting to come apart like moldy encyclopedias
in some abandoned, dusty archive that we have to take the bitter with the sweet or soon
all distinctions will be submerged by the tide of tepid approval of everything that is
beginning to gather force and direction as well?  And when its mighty roar threatens in
earnest the partially submerged bridges and cottages, picks up the floundering cattle to
deposit them in trees and so on to who knows what truly horrible mischief, it will be
time, then, to genuinely rethink this and come up with true standards of evaluation, only
it will be too late of course, too late for anything but the satisfaction that lasts only just so
long.  A pity, though.  Meanwhile I lift my glass to these back-and-silver striped nights.  I
believe that the rain never drowned sweeter, mmore prosaic things than those we have
here, now, and I believe this is going to have to be enough.
Striped hair, inquisitive gloves, a face, some woman named Ernestine Throckmorton,
white opera glasses and more