On Friendship, Haiku, Lust, and Blame
Eye of hurricane,
or all-seeing bug on top
of lean apple tree,
look at me and think,
this is life this wait this day
in haiku heaven
with my friend you: why
miss writing our haikus when
we can write new ones
and live within them
as the guest hosts of a late
night talk show you hear
from the room next door
to yours in no-sleep motels
full of books, the books
we want to write, you
and I, alone together
for the first time since
the night when we walked
and solved riddling brainteasers
on Riverside Drive.
* * *
I, too, love moon sex,
dream tigers, split insights, and
spiritual puns.
Spiritual puns
are coincidences, said
G. K. Chesterton.
Can haiku do the work
of a spiritual pun?
Strangers meet on train.
One kills the other’s
wife and wants his own father
killed by the other.
Or the survivor
sleeps with the victim’s widow
after killing him.
Both Alfred Hitchcock
and Sophocles believe in
spiritual puns.
* * *
Rhyme in haiku seems
contrary to the spirit
of the Eastern mind.
That must be why I
do it though of course you’re right
I shouldn’t. And so night
falls as it must on
us all, and to bed must I
go, to sleep, to dream,
and not to die. O
friend it pleases me to write
these haiku with you.
* * *
Blame not my blood so
hot with lust as when I was
young and in college,
studying Spenser,
“The Garden of Adonis”
in The Faerie Queene,
which had the oddest
effect on me: I went to
the library and
picked up Kathy and
took her back to her place and
later that night we went
to the West End Bar
and pretended to quarrel
over the baby
that we didn’t have
which freaked out the other
couple in the booth
so we had it all
to ourselves. Blame not my youth;
her hormones blame not.
Blame not the future
or lament that we are old.
The best is yet to
be, said Rabbi Ben
Ezra in Browning’s poem.
It’s hard to agree.
Yet blame him not, though
blame enough there is for all
the sins we have cast
upon the waters.
Blame not the bread we flung in
the Hudson River.
