“Generally, a haibun consists of one or more paragraphs of prose written in a concise, imagistic haikai style, and one or more haiku. A haibun may record a scene, or a special moment, in a highly descriptive and objective manner or may occupy a wholly fictional or dream-like space. The accompanying haiku may have a direct or subtle relationship with the prose and encompass or hint at the gist of what is recorded in the prose sections.”
This is the third in a series of seasonal haibun I’ve been working on. They can easily be read as individuals, though there are through lines, so I’ve removed the paywall on Autumn, 2024, and Winter, 2025 for anyone who would like to begin at the beginning. I will continue to do this as the series proceeds. There is both audio and text for each. I am enjoying the haibun very much, as a form and as a way of thinking. It is a pleasurable and curious space, and I think a fairly accurate record-keeping device, which interests me greatly. It’s like fitting a months-long journal onto a postcard. Here’s what spring felt like from here.
Spring, 2025 / a haibun (audio)
A HAIBUN FOR EACH SEASON / SPRING, 2025 Beauty is not a hoax. - Annie Dillard Presto changeo, a new day. We wake up one fine morning –alive– an infant taking their first breath of birdsong at dawn chorus. We are so filled with zephyr we can’t help but breathe out, in praise, the names of each new sign of life; robin, catbird, veery, wren, the heads and necks of hen turkeys standing sentinels in the tall grass, the tall grass, the rivers swollen with small silver fish, then large ones, then us, bare chests, the first sundresses, elbows, collarbones, it doesn’t end. Something wants to be born. Something pummels us. Something barely sheathed. Power broods and lights. We’re played on like a pipe. Our breath is not our own. James Houston describes two young Eskimo girls sitting cross-legged on the ground, mouth on mouth, blowing by turns each other’s throat cords, making a low, unearthly music. On every slope with Yellow birch, hemlock, and ash, I can feel the swelling seep springs pass against the soles of my feet like a palm feeling new life turn in the womb. We soften our boundaries. Things thaw and get back to rotting. A familiar motion sick when I see the first shoots of sessile bellwort and then, so soon, its pale flower. Again, I’m not ready. Reality outruns apprehension every time. The willow whips go yellow, trembling aspen green, skunk cabbage green, the green of bracken ferns, blue and purple pubescent bloom with ants crawling up and down their backs for nectar, wild leek green. For days, I think of nothing but soft cheeses; tongues of young mozzarella wrapped and cured in myrtle branches, chevre from Helen at Ram’s Farm, her barn freshened with newborn goats, the barn cats curled in the hay feeder, full of milk, everyone full of milk; Helen, the goats, the cats, the sheepdogs pressing their bodies into mine from both sides, trying to keep me going in a straight line, the wild plums behind the barn where the whey is poured, blooming in pointed puffs of frankincense. Dark spots of frogspawn and white spots of newly dropped fawns appear as dappled light – and salamander skin, like the taught surface of a small pond. Understanding is the aperception of pattern as such. The chaos of frog song is right in time with some rising sound in me. I can’t see between the trees anymore. Leaves emerge and begin filling the forms of their ancestors as if they have some terminal lucidity and know exactly what to do. Who is my unseen companion? Why is the sky haint blue? What stays? New lives every day, but most are born right into the mouths of hungry animals, into war-zones, they encounter uncrossable roads. The dog runs her nose over every inch of my car to smell their fresh death when I return home. A wolf spider lives in the garden, one of the largest I’ve seen. She slung her white sack of eggs on her belly for weeks. While watering the herbs on the first hot morning after the full strawberry moon, I felt someone look at me, the way you feel someone walk up beside you and slip their loving hand into yours and you don’t know who it is yet but you know where to look and I do - my head snapped down to see her perched on the toe of my boot. A thousand eyes shone up at me, a thousand new lives that she now carries on her back. The sun sets on the dying hare, the same as the soft backs of mountains. The loon lays two eggs each year, but will only know one with feathered wings.
* The passage beginning “Something pummels us” is from a gorgeous book by Annie Dillard called For the Time Being.
*Reality outruns apprehension is Moby Dick by way of Terence McKenna.
*Understanding is the aperception of pattern as such is Alfred North Whitehead.
Good writing makes me feel like I'm there with you. Thanks.
Something is born!