Highland Lassie

            On Monday I got up feeling extra groggy again, but it went away during yoga.

I finished writing my first two haibun. I followed for the most part the fashion of Fred Wah, whose work we covered in the fall. For the prose parts he uses a kind of focused stream of consciousness writing technique and so I did that as well. But Wah puts his prose in the past tense while haibun is supposed to be in the present. I deviated from his style and took everything that I’d written about the past, even of different periods, and put it all in the present.

            Here’s what I came up with:

One-Handed-Rolly Haibun

You roll a perfect cigarette with one hand while steering the tractor with the other from harrow to harvest always Vogue papers and Macdonald’s Export tobacco with the Highland Lassie on the package who I think looks like my mother, I have to admit that the rollies you make from that pouch are less unpleasant than the stinking Rothmans tailor-mades that Mom smokes, leaning your bad back forward tired and thoughtful in the chair at your end of the kitchen table in the corner by the toaster beneath the old brown radio news with your elbows on your knees and your suspenders relaxing by your hips you take slow, contemplative drags from your after dinner cigarette, always holding it between the tips of index and thumb, but never between fingers like a lady, my sister and I don’t want you and Mom to smoke, you take our complaints with grumpy calm until one day you stop, and we don’t dare to say anything out of fear that we are yelled at or that speaking puts a jinx on our good fortune, weeks later you climb on Mom’s back to stop her from smoking and stay there until she dies.

rolling a smoke with one hand

wind blows back to tractor

cool mist of DDT

Tailor-Made Chain Haibun

Those stinking Rothmans sticks you smoke that smell like tobacco blended with sugar and sewage turn my stomach and so does their memory long after you die of breast cancer when I’m a teenager, you smoke even after your mastectomy, you smoke everywhere with everyone and have lots of friends but it must be tough for you when dad kicks the habit, smoking in the smoky teachers lounge with your colleagues, you smoke with my brother, with your next oldest brothers, your cousins and my father’s youngest sisters, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, the fowl smell of cigarette corpses in the house and car ashtrays, and after dinner plates full of butts, do you start smoking with dad or do you start with the other girls in boarding school, nobody complains but my dad, my sister and me.

sighing neath her beehive

she crushes the lipstick filter

into unfinished eggs

            I tried writing a poem in a style that I saw Susan Musgrave use in which the ends of most lines could be the ends of sentences but continue on in the next line. I applied the technique to an old piece of prose that I wrote about my ex-girlfriend sixteen years ago. It definitely turned it into a poem:

My efforts to understand her helped me gain

confidence as a lover, which is a strength

that comes from knowledge of another person’s need

to live a different pace, but maybe that’s fear

of rejection and of growing forceful at being

tactful at the expense of being true

to my own vision, which had to be altered

in order to see her point of view and to find courage

to add my voice to her perception,

which quite often took the form of an apology

for trying to defeat her, which was her victory

over her attraction to me, because she could

not be interested in men that she could push

away without them standing up to the test and fighting

to keep the lines of communication alive

by listening better, since she had a hard time

embracing any other viewpoint

than her own. So I grew

abler at listening and struggling

against the urge to blindly argue

but that only seemed to make her battle

more to hurl her anger and disappointment

over all the ways that I was falling

short in terms of application

which she told me was pushing her

away from our collaboration

in romance because she didn’t think

it was possible for us to be

partners, which broke my assurance a bit

more, so I don’t know if I gained

strength that’s hidden beneath the rubble

of us or not.

I learned a lot more about the female

body and how to be creative

in response to relationships than any

other, which frequently required a stretch

of courage and perception: Becoming

stronger at giving in to her weakness.