November 3: Blue Jay

The haiku master Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827) often wrote humorous observations of the animal life around him, like these gems, translated by Robert Hass:

The bedbugs
scatter as I clean,
parents and children.

The mountain cuckoo--
a fine voice,
and proud of it!

(From The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa, edited by Robert Hass)

In that same vein, I offer up today's haiku, with a short back story: I've stuck a small bird feeder filled with black sunflower seed on the window in front of my office desk. I'm often entertained and pleasantly distracted throughout the work day by the various birds who visit. Regular drop-ins include tufted titmice, chickadees, goldfinches, a white-breasted nuthatch or two, the occasional song sparrow, and, if I'm lucky, a cardinal or rose-breasted grosbeak. Lately, however, the blue jays have figured out how to balance on the tiny feeder to get their share of seed. The cheeky birds look in at me with beady black eyes that shine with sly intelligence. At first I shooed them off, but now I stop what I'm doing to admire them--their color, cleverness, and audacity. They're smart and they get what they want. And as I carry out my work, there are probably lessons I could be learning by following their example, if I could dare to be so brash.

Big greedy blue jay,
you can barely fit yourself
in my bird feeder.

November 2: All Soul's Day/Day of the Dead

Tonight as I was driving home from work, the full moon was just beginning to peek above the dark rim of Mount Battie, the hill that forms the backdrop to my neighborhood. At the base of Mount Battie is Mount View Cemetery, where my maternal grandfather, great-grandparents, and other family members lie buried. On this day of remembering our loved ones who have passed on, it seemed appropriate that the lunar light was shining down the mountainside onto these rows of headstones in the middle of our town.

November's full moon

emerges, cloud-shrouded, high

over Mount Battie.

When I was about six, we lived near this cemetery for a while, and I used to ramble around the grounds and surrounding woods with the neighborhood kids. There was one gravestone on the far side of the cemetery that was simply a giant, unshaped chunk of pink rose quartz with a memorial plaque affixed to it. We all thought this was the most beautiful stone imaginable, and made special pilgrimages to see it, as we would to the vernal pool nearby when the polliwogs hatched each spring. Even now as an adult, living once again within walking distance of the cemetery, I will sometimes make a detour on a walk into town just to see that stone, to reassure myself it's still there and that I know where it is, an odd touchstone to my childhood roamings. Interestingly, I don't remember the name on the stone, but I think it's a woman's. (A big pink stone probably wouldn't be considered very manly.) Thus in these small ways we remember our dead, and our past, and celebrate the full moon of the present.

November 1: All Saint's Day

A few of my fellow writers are doing this November Novel Writing Month thing, for which they plan to write 50,000 words during the month of November. Not being a novelist, and not even being a very prolific poet at the moment, I thought that I might follow the concept in the most basic, simple form I can think of. So my plan: I'm going to try to write a haiku every day for as long as I can.

As many of us may remember from back in grade school, a haiku is a syllabic Japanese poetry form of three lines in which the lines are five, seven, and five syllables respectively. A proper haiku includes a kigo, or season word, indicating the season in which the poem is set. For serious haiku writers, there are large almanacs of kigo for inspiration. For example, references to the arrival of cranes, grave visits, and chysanthemums would all signal a (Japanese) poem set in autumn. As a natural history essayist and avid student of nature, this seasonal attentiveness of the form appeals to me--in addition to its brevity. I often resort to writing haiku as a form of writing something when I've got writer's block. I find that the constraints and minimalism of the form then may free me up or jump start me to write longer pieces.

Several years ago a dear friend gave me a copy of the Les Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry, complete with replicas of some of the beautiful illuminations painted by the Limbourg brothers. This "Book of Hours" was primarily a religious calendar, and its works of art not only depict seasonally appropriate scenes of everyday life in the French countryside, but also include religious scenes and private references to the life of the Duke himself. For some reason, this combination of the spiritual, the mundane, and the beautiful has always appealed to me and I've often wondered how to respond to the Book of Hours in a poetic way. This may be it, or not.

This is not a Book of Hours but a Book of Days, because most days one haiku is probably going to be about all I can handle. So, here's today's, inspired by the bright green parsley plant still flourishing amid frost-killed marigolds in my garden on one of the last warm mornings of fall:


Parsley sprigs still green

despite several nights of frost.

Slowly winter comes.