Something about my dad's haiku
I tried to explain to him how to read haiku: dip your little finger in it and smell the ripples, or pull it over your head, like a sheet, and let it exhale softly on your skin. Or close your eyes and stare intently at that muted, infinite glint of its perspective. Only then can you build the haiku's image in your head, delicately - but make sure it isn't a still photograph, because haiku moves. Make sure it's more like a perfect bubble, with rainbows sighing onto the curvature, and the world of the haiku breathing within. Have the summer temple inside, glimpsed through the blossoms that aren't there anymore, because they've fluttered into a springtime haiku, where they're content to brocade the straw cape of that serene rafter and his stilled water surface. Or perhaps, upstream a little way, that still water becomes the rapids that Yuzuru's fallen camellia completely ignores, poised Buddha-like on its rock in quiet pinkness. Or perhaps it's not pink, but white sazanka leaving its white shadows on white walls, as how a haiku leaves its invisible print on the astonished mind, in some deeper shade of white that I can recognize only as pure, whole love.
But he insisted on laughing off such meditations, and, pointing to last night's dinner on the kitchen table, turned Basho, Issa and Buson in their graves with his impromptu haiku -
Chicken wings,
Table,
Hungry
- and even though something deep white inside me shrivelled, I found myself laughing at the way it was funny like sunshine skidding across a windowsill, brightening a room, nonetheless.