Spring rain:

A saffron dust of pollen

On mottled

green glass.

Spring rain:

Disappeared mountaintop

Learning the secrets of hiding

From a swath of cloud.

Spring rain:

My street shoes slick

With red mud

In the ditch beside the old dirt road.

Spring rain:

Light gathers in beads

Along the crack

In the shed's one window.

Spring rain:

A fallen dogwood limb

Obstructs the gate

To the empty garden.

Spring rain:

Tomcat funk

Moving out from

Under the hostas.

Spring rain:

Bloodroot wilting

On Easter morning.

Spring rain:

My lost notebook

Fat with wet blue ink

After a night in the grass.

Clearances

In Memoriam M.K. H. 1911--1984

She taught me what her uncle once taught her:
How easily the biggest coal block split
If you got the grain and hammer angled right.

The sound of that relaxed alluring blow,
Its co-opted and obliterating echo,
Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen,

Taught me between the hammer and the block
To face the music. Teach me now to listen,
To strike it rich behind the linear black.

--Seamus Heaney

Snickers bars don't last long when they're in the same room with Pixie Sticks.

Snickers bars make friends with those who need them.

Snickers bars get lost in the produce aisle very easily and then get in trouble for harassing heads of cauliflower.

Snickers bars go wild on the last day of school and instigate water balloon fights in hallways.

Snickers bars get queasy on Ferris wheels but not on carousels. They like to go sit between the wooden heads of swans and move around in gentle circles.

Snickers bars mispronounce the names of cartoon characters, particularly the ones they've known about forever.

Snickers bars are afraid of the red pens teachers use to grade papers. They love the smell of Sharpies but not the sound of fingernails on chalkboards.

Snickers bars carry grudges for a long time and can melt down into rivers of chocolate when opened too quickly, spreading across slopes of classroom desks into laps and onto sheets of notebook paper. You shouldn't mess with Snickers bars.

Snickers bars take bets on how long it will take hot glue guns to perish, useless and sealed away from craftsy tasks forever.

Snickers bars get nervous at the tardy bell.

Snickers bars enjoy the brightness of primary colors on classroom walls and often wish their drab earth colored wrappers were red or purple.

Snickers bars love Hallowe'en because they get to travel.

Snickers bars are foolish, made up of nutty whimsy and the salt of buried acorns under oak trees. They like to be party favors but only when the crowd is young and goofy. I once carried one around in my coat pocket for a week, until my hand reached in and it was gone. Inside the lining, though, I found an orange marble. I set it down on my bedside table and there it sits, beside a chewed up stob of pencil and a tiny pink eraser in the schoolchild shape of a butterfly.

Translations from Poèmes

27

When
a rock
dies
it has
no need
to bury itself away.

53

Every object
that falls
blesses itself.

119

The hand
became
a nest
to catch
the bird.

144

The utensils being washed
held a conversation.

169

The flight
of birds
seized by fright
has the air
of swimming.

170

Winter is cold
only at the approach
of spring.

178

Leaves
in the bouquet
are
so many fingers
reaching
toward the flower.

181

Electricity
is hysterical
and neon
bloodless.

Malcom de Chazal

Here is the text of the poem in the original French:

From Poèmes

27

Quand
Une roche
Meurt
Elle n'a pas
Besoin
De s'enterrer.

53

Tout objet
Qui tombe
Se signe.

119

La main
Se faisait
Nid
Pour attraper
L'oiseau.

144

Les utensiles qu'on lavait
Tenaient une conversation.

169

Les oiseaux
Saisis d'effroi
Dans leur vol
Ont l'air
De nager.

170

L'hiver n'a froid
Qu'a l'approche
Du printemps.

178

Les feuilles
Dans le bouquet
Sont
Autant de doigts
Tendus
Vers la fleur.

181

L'électricité
Est hystérique
Et le néon
Est sec de coeur.

Regard experiences as if they are about to disappear. What is it that anchors them in reality? What would you save of them? What would you give up? Only someone who has achieved independence and detachment, someone whose homeland is "sweet" but whose circumstances make it impossible to recapture that sweetness, can answer those questions. (Such a person would also find it impossible to derive satisfaction from substitutes furnished by illusion or dogma.)

This may seem like a prescription for an unrelieved grimness of outlook and, with it, a permanently sullen disapproval of all enthusiasm or buoyancy of spirit. Not necessarily. While it perhaps seems peculiar to speak of the pleasures of exile, there are some positive things to be said for a few of its conditions. Seeing "the entire world as a foreign land" makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions; an awareness that---to borrow a phrase from music---is contrapuntal.

For an exile, habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally. There is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension, especially if the exile is conscious of other contrapuntal sympathy. There is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one is at home wherever one happens to be.

This remains, however: the habit of dissimulation is both wearying and nerve-racking. Exile is never the state of being satisfied, placid, or secure. Exile, in the words of Wallace Stevens, is "a mind of winter" in which the pathos of summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable. Perhaps this is another way of saying that a life of exile moves according to a different calendar and is less seasonal and settled than life at home. Exile is life led outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentered, and contrapuntal; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew.

--Edward Said, from Reflections on Exile and Other Essays

Every word
I reach
finds delight
in the language
of waking
space

lks 5/13/09

from the haiku magnets

For every one torturer, there are a thousand people ready to risk their lives to save one another. For every soldier who shoots in a neighborhood, there are a thousand companeros who help and protect each other.

--Isabel Allende

(I hope she's right. I think she must have experience that informs what she's saying. )

http://www.isabelallende.com/

Despite the cool spring wind

The prayer flags hang motionless.

ii.

I saw their soft gray cloth

With the skin of

My feeling mind.

iii.

The prayer flags made friends

With the weathered gray wood

They lay against.

iv.

The travel of hornets

Is all one thing.

The way they buzz

The tattered flags

Is part of that thing.

v.

The old dragon's mauve jaws

Carry age and the droop of solitude

In the prayer flags' upper

Left hand corners.

vi.

The prayer flags turned pink

In the softening light

Of April dusk.

vii.

Once a merry string of

Primary color,

The prayer flags take it easy now.

viii.

See how the flags resist

Disappearance.

They hang like pale strips of soft iron

From ten-penny nails.

ix.

Beneath the prayer flags

And boards of smoke-gray wood

A strip of metal

Collapsed in hot June rain.

x.

I told the prayer flags

A couple of my best secrets.

The gunmetal dog with the fat jowls

Kept quiet

While I talked.

xi.

I don't see the prayer flags

In the inky air of this

Thick summer evening.

If I listen and hear

What's behind them

I can see how their edges

Catch light.

xii.

A thick goldenrod cord

Takes care of all the prayer flags,

Bright like a sign on a highway,

Pinning them to

A buckled gray rail.

xiii.

The storm took a long time

To gather.

When it did,

It took the prayer flags with it,

Squares of ash and rose

Cut free

By a big green wind.