They also record atmospheric indefiniteness, as in a haiku on rain-soaked trees in misty twilights65 or this on a reoriented sea gull:
dense mist—
in dawn light a gull
again finds land66
This haibun does not resolve the mystery of such indefiniteness but tries to simply poetically record or celebrate it. At its conclusion, echoing Whitman’s breaching of eternity in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Lynch engages in a more traditional way Lifshitz’s concern with the limits of human perception and consciousness:
Victoria, buy a few peaches, toss pits into the sea. To what avail time, waiting for the ferry.
cross the straits
through evening blue
venus behind thin clouds
I lean on the rail. Tonight too, crossing Victoria ferry, white sea gulls high in the air float with motionless wings. To what avail space.67
But, more importantly, Lynch’s haibun as a whole are a testament, beyond the question of the failures of human subjectivity, of the revelatory subjectivities in nature which—though partially hidden, like the star in this haiku—are nonetheless waiting for our aesthetic contact.
A volume as strong as Rain Drips from the Trees is Penny Harter’s At the Zendō (1993), a collection of haiku, haibun, and poetry centered on trips to the Dai Bosatsu Zendō, a traditional Zen Buddhist monastery in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, and on the act of attaining Buddhist enlightenment. The main section, “A Weekend at Dai Bosatsu Zendō,” is a diary of a visit to the monastery in September 1987, beginning with the picking up of friends at Grand Central Station in New York City and ending with Harter’s departure from the monastery: This haibun records Harter’s gradual induction into the way of life and, finally, the consciousness of a Zen Buddhist monastery registering Harter’s gradual awakening into a Zennian consciousness through the more and more subtle presentations of her responses to her thoughts and perceptions.
A key passage occurs at the first morning meditation. After an hour of chanting sutras while walking rapidly with the other residents, a period of silent sitting meditation, and ten minutes of collective silent walking, Harter and the others begin silent sitting meditation again:
Another half hour of zazen. No time passes, and at the gong my eyes start open to see each thing distinct, luminous, itself.
after meditation
one leaf settles
into the grass
sunrise—
tree trunks
dividing mist
Chanting, we file in, to a silent breakfast. Unfolding the cloth that covers the chopsticks and nested lacquer bowls we carried from the meditation hall, we place chopsticks on our right, tips angled off the table’s edge, separate the bowls, all following last night’s instructions.
just oatmeal in the bowl—
oatmeal glistening
in the bowl68
This passage reveals the process whereby Harter’s consciousness is transformed so by meditation that she begins to see things, in the Zennian phrase, just as they are, without the intervention of subjective consciousness: a leaf simply falls to the grass, trees simply appear out of the mist, oatmeal simply sits in its bowl.
This newly won awareness carries over through a hectic day and night of activity as memory:
I lie quietly, remembering the presence in the corner of the dining hall:
evening meditation
the jade plant sits
next to its reflection69
This entrance into universal subjectivity also registers the Buddhist idea of compassion for all living things when, the next day Harter visits the monastery cemetery:
climbing to the stupa—
not stepping on
the red salamander70
In this encounter while visiting an important monastery teacher’s grave, we also sense a hint of the teacher’s spirit incarnated in this simple creature, a moment just as it is, but resonating all the more deeply with Buddhist reality.
The haibun concludes with Harter’s departure and an expression of her newly found compassion and consciousness:
among the trees
somewhere rain falling
on the doe’s back
coming down
so many more leaves
have turned71
Harter’s compassion for other subjectivities is extended to the doe in the rain. Time has passed since Harter entered the zendō. More autumn leaves have taken on bright color. Nothing much else has changed externally. Yet, for Harter, for her consciousness, everything has changed.
This change remains with Harter into the next year. After a haiku retreat at Spring Lake, New Jersey, Harter returns to her home and begins sitting meditation:
...at once tears rolling down my cheeks, knowing we are only this, only precisely what we are doing at any given moment, no more; we are as transparent as the leaf in sunlight. Nothing matters because nothing exists. Our houses are just paper boxes blown down around us—our bodies are just paper bags blown in around us. Inside we go in and up—we are nothing except everything else. I truly don’t know who, better yet what I am, what we are, all of us peopling, infinite variety, yet all the same, since I (we) don’t exist except in the moment, constantly changing.72
Alluding perhaps to the statement attributed to Basho that haiku is what is happening at a given place at a given moment, Harter here offers the highwater mark for English-language haibun as a revelation of spiritual consciousness.
In a lighter vein, but with a serious underlying motif, is Met on the Road: A Transcontinental Haiku Journey by William J. Higginson and Penny Harter (1993). The work records the authors’ relocation from Scotch Plains, New jersey to Santa Fe, New Mexico, beginning with a meeting of the Haiku Society of America in New York City and ending with Higginson’s trip to a Haiku North America convention in California just after their arrival in Santa Fe. At both the meeting and the convention, and along the way to Santa Fe, the authors collected haiku from people they visited with. The work thus incidentally becomes an anthology of haiku by some of the strongest contemporary American haiku poets.
The light, but bittersweet, tone of the work is established by the presence of the authors’ pet cat, which becomes an icon of the home they will probably never return to. The mood of nostalgia is introduced the night before they leave:
Finally, around midnight, we begin packing the car—in the garage for the first time since we moved into the house. Don’t forget Purr, the eight-year-old cat.
the neighborhood
silent under streetlamps—
a thin mist73
The pain of nostalgia heats up at a stop in Pennsylvania:
does he even know us
this cat after months
in a cage
purring cat—
how long ago in Paterson
your littermate died
Occasionally blurting out, “What could we do?” we drove to our evening’s stop.... Getting ready for bed, we close the door and turn Purr loose in our room for the night, setting the pattern that we’ll follow for the next several days. From our old house, 320 miles.
the cat stares