HAIKU: THIS WAS HOW MY college poetry professor, the poet Jorie Graham, had begun our semester. The essentials of poetry, she insisted, were contained in the three-line form. On the board she wrote one translation: Sick on a journey my dreams wander the withered fields. Then another: Sick on a journey over parched fields dreams wander on.
She asked how they were different. I had no idea.
Then she erased the second version—which, without explanation, she said she didn’t like—and kept writing, her back turned to us. Another year gone hat in hand sandals on our feet. And then another. A small eternity passed as the three-line poems proliferated on the board. Our homework, she said, was to choose a few—she was never too specific in her instructions—and rearrange each one ten times.
Back at my dorm, I tried various permutations, each worse than the next. I tried: I wonder how he lives My neighbor In deep autumn. Then: In deep autumn I do not know how My neighbor lives. Was this any different? Better or worse? Probably worse. I was not a natural, but something did happen to me as I scratched through the assignment, hating my bad drafts. I had slowed down and focused on just a handful of words. The original text, which initially appeared like something I might have written myself, now seemed untouchable, invulnerable to correction.
Did Patrick know that poems like this existed? We had just finished The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and I didn’t know what to teach next. These little poems seemed just right. They were too short to intimidate. Periods and commas appeared optional. Just one or two images; just one or two senses; just one surprise. They could be rewritten in infinite ways. Or, as I learned, they resisted being rewritten. Reading these, there was less potential to feel that one’s response was wrong and more opportunity simply to respond.
—
READING HAIKUS SILENTLY the next day, Patrick laughed.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
Casually.
“Spider busy, not bothering anybody,” he said. “I can relate to that, you know.”
I gave him the whole book of haikus and told him to take his time flipping through them on his own. “Mark the ones you like,” I said. “There are more than a hundred, so take your time.”
Minutes passed. I waited. I occupied myself with an anthology of poetry, marking poems I wanted to read with him.
“Which one’s your favorite?” I asked finally.
He studied the poems, comparing them. Then he pointed at this haiku:
Blossoms at night,
and the faces of people
moved by music.
“Probably this one,” he said.
That one body of words moved him more distinctly than another—this seemed vital. But why had he chosen it?
“I like that one, too. What do you like about it?”
“That it be real.” He shrugged to indicate he was done talking.
“Okay,” I said. “What else do you like?”
Patrick chose this:
Napped half the day;
No one
punished me!
“Why do you like this one?” I asked.
“?’Cause it be true. I sleep all day here and don’t nothing get said about it. Don’t nobody punish me for doing nothing.”
I asked if he meant at home or in jail, and he said both.
Then he pointed to another poem and said, “I like this one, too.”
The world of dew
Is the world of dew
And yet—and yet
I said, “That’s a good one. He wrote that after his son died.”
He nodded—that appeared to make sense to him.
“What kind of feeling do you get reading it?”
Patrick gazed at the page intently. Then he said, “Feeling of accepting. It is what it is.”
Now he leaned forward and asked suddenly, “Is it raining, Ms. Kuo?”
I wondered if the dew in the poem had reminded him of rain.
I said it had been raining when I came in. He nodded soberly, as if I’d said something serious about God or politics.
“Man. I miss the rain. I can’t tell when it rain. I thought it be raining today. I was gonna ask you if it really raining or a shower from another cell.”
“You’re never sure?”
“Naw.”
The rain now made me remember something I meant to show him. “Oh,” I began. “I met this nice old white dude named Douglas.”
Patrick guffawed and covered his face. “Ms. Kuo say old white dude,” he said to himself.
I laughed, too. “What’s so funny?”
I had met Douglas a few weeks ago, I said. The man knew every tree in Helena. Patrick’s shoulders had loosened. “You like them trees, Ms. Kuo?”
I didn’t know much about trees, but I did love the ginkgo. When I’d told Douglas that, he lit up. The ginkgo! He liked the ginkgo, too. It was an old tree, here since the day of Adam and Eve. Its bloom was very short, only a week. A few days after that conversation, I found a bag of tomatoes holding down a piece of paper on my windshield: It was a map of downtown Helena, with an X to mark the last blooming ginkgo tree.
“When I saw the tree,” I said, “I wished you could see it, too.”
I said that a poem has images, a fancy word for what he already knew all about: a picture of something that we could see or hear or feel or touch.
He got the hang of it quickly. “What are the images here?” I’d ask, pointing.
“Blossoms, because you can see them; music, because you can hear it.”
“What about this one?”
“Dew, because you can touch it and smell it,” he said, then added after a second, “And sometime see it.”
We went through more. Words I normally took for granted were for Patrick a labor of imagination—some described things he had never encountered. “Mountain,” he read. “I ain’t never really seen a mountain, to be honest.”
“What about an ocean?” I asked.
He wrinkled his eyebrows, a great groove now bisecting his forehead. “Maybe,” he said finally, honestly.
“Last poem for the day,” I said. “It uses a vocabulary word, fleeting. I’m going to tell you how fleeting is used and you guess what it means. Ready? Okay. Let’s say you hear the sound of a bird but only for a second. Or let’s say you have a dream about Cherish at night but it disappears as soon as you have it. We say that the sound is fleeting, the dream is fleeting. Now, what do you think fleeting means?”
Patrick thought. “Brief?” he asked. “Passing by?”
I nodded and then put my hand in my pocket. “Can you guess what’s in my hand? Just guess,” I urged.
“Some candy?” he asked.
I gave Patrick a golden ginkgo leaf. He ran his fingertip along its veins and then twirled the leaf in his hands, like a makeshift pinwheel.
“This bright gold that you see doesn’t last long on the tree. After the leaves turn gold, they’ll fall within a week or two. Like, you could say the color blooms in a fleeting way, or fleetingly.” Patrick was still studying the leaf, not listening to me.
“What do you think?” I asked.