The Of of Of

An undectet of recursive haiku from the backyard garden.

The bluejay eyeing the dog bowl water
from its branch refuses to descend
until I look away.

The holes in the leaves.
Silences in a poem.
Snails’ meals.

Revising a poem I won’t share.
The dog gnawing a stick
like it’s a bone.

Redeemed when I tread
through the garden. The only sinners here
have wings.

Every haiku a metaphor for poetry.
The laziness of poets. But only a poem is adequate
to concretize a soul. The laziness of God.

Big stick the dog dragged out of the woods
abandoned on the lawn. Poem I wish to share
but cannot finish.

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I was thinking about whether these haiku were haiku at all, and whether writing them was “hard” or “easy” or both, when I randomly ran across Rutger Hauer’s “Tears in Rain” speech at the end of Blade Runner on instagram. If you don’t know the speech, here’s an interesting YouTube that argues why it is the greatest death soliloquy in film.

Reading the comments under the clip on instagram, I was tempted to comment “this is the greatest monologue of all time in the greatest film of all time” and wondering whether I believed that statement truly or just felt like saying in the moment, when I saw another comment that said:

Got to meet [Rutger Hauer] at an acting workshop. He said about the scene, “I didn’t write any of the words, but I wrote all of the silences.”

While the unsaid is the largest part of any poem, the compression of haiku heightens and enlarges that silence. Deciding what to say is always important, of course, but deciding what not to say, where not to say it, and how to use what is said to shade the silences, or vice-versa is where haiku transcends its limitations of scale. Fail to appreciate this, and the writing is hard. Learn to treasure it, and the writing becomes relatively easy. It’s just that appreciating silence is hard in itself, regardless of whether you apply it to art, so to arrive at a good haiku still requires the same effort; it’s just that the writing becomes the easy part.

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No squash since August
but the leaves of the squash plant are still going nuts
deep into October.

Imagine the moonlight on the leaves
of the squash plant
at night when you’re not out here.

The brass wind chimes
silent but not still.
The smallest possible wind.

Dove’s
irregular cry
lifts my eyes from my phone.

Less the sound of sight
and the sight of sound
than the of of of.