Three Haibun
Leaving &
Listening
A memorial for
a student, only 19 years old, after a two-year battle with
Ewing's sarcoma. A place chosen by Andrew: the Red Butte
Garden in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains. His
family on the amphitheater stage, 150 friends seated on
folding chairs and another 100 sat on slate ledges and
lawn or stood in the back. His uncle took a risk and
departed from his prepared remarks when he asked us to be
still and listen to the sound of the wind in the trees and
the water trickling into the lily pond.
spring
afternoon
dragonfly hovering
celebrating life
First grade.
The bell rung. School's out! The last day of school. A
lie, of course. The end of summer proved it so. But, today
really is my last day of school. Took my last breath as a
professor. But, what had I professed? That inspiration is
an active process. A principle of respiratory physiology,
but also a precept of pedagogy. Bertha Lindsay, the "Last
Living Shaker," had told us on a school visit to the
Canterbury Shaker Village "Every breath a prayer." Now I
wonder, "Every breath a lesson?" She had been taken to
Canterbury as an orphan in 1905. On her first day, the
bell rung, then members greeted her in the apple orchard.
eyes closed
holding hands in a circle
honey bees buzzing
After 27 years
of living in Salt Lake City, Utah, time to move to Pacific
Grove, California. Bittersweet. Our last Sunday. Sleet
last night. Summer was not over. Autumn had not yet
turned. Today we head up Big Cottonwood Canyon. Aspens
still green are framed in white. Ess curves take us up to
8730 feet. We walk the snow-packed path that encircles
Silver Lake.
Shhh.
a mallard
paddles by
one white tail feather
floating to shore
Acrostic
If Jorge Luis
Borges Had Deathbed Regrets
“I’m not fond of
Lorca… this is a shortcoming of mine… and then it was a
lucky thing for him to be executed. Best thing to happen
for a poet. A fine death, no?” Borges 1981 comment on his
old rival, Garcia Lorca, executed in 1936. Borges died of
cancer in 1986.
Glory at
last shrivels the rose it reveres
And the memory of an endless poem comes to him
Relentless like a nightmare. The distance weighs
in,
Colors disperse, dissolving in the intricate tune.
In that hour of fine sandy light
A string of labored tropes has no life.
Like a memory that arrives exhausted,
One memory more for time
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.
Conjecture and memory flowed in on that casual
utterance
And a silent voice comes to him out of the past.
Glorious memory or a date learned by rote,
And each thing there, in its appointed place,
Repeated and repeated. Its vast encompassing
Circle can take it all, can accomplish all.
In the deep universal night
A man does not even expect death.
Like pointless dates of murky anniversaries,
One thing does not exist: Oblivion.
Remaining but a shadow,
Crystalline memory through its endless mazes
wanders
And glows forever in this poetry.
Guilt, the festering wound, awaits the last of the
gods
And, for better or worse, troubles the age’s
uncertainty,
Reaches your soul. Now you are dead.
Content, he knows the world is eternal.
In memory, that lucid paradise,
A house stands open until dawn.
Like an awaited music
Only one thing was missing.
Recovered by memory, you will give me that shore of
your life
Cast up into silence.
And still, and still, you have not written the
poem.
About Neal Whitman
Neal Whitman lives on
California's Monterey Peninsula, where he is a member of
the Pacific Grove LIbrary Board and a volunteer docent at
Robinson Jeffers Tor House in nearby Carmel. He has
published over 40 poems in 18 journals, in an effort to
make a public statement of a private labor.
