After reading Jane Hershfield’s illuminating The Heart of Haiku (an Amazon e-book about Basho that costs just $0.99), it is hard to resist writing some lines in modest imitation of the master. For example,

Even as it rains
beating the roof, windshield drenched
I’m missing the rain

Fading autumn sky
swallows the swaying branches
silhouettes on black

Arduously mixed–
lines, blocks of color, faces
wet scraps under foot

Last week I slept in an old B&B,
Victorian, Midwestern, built to convey
High respectability: a house for
A father of its foursquare, limestone town.
Now it wears a bohemian skrim,
Offering brownies and soy granola.
There is said to be a ghost. I don’t know
What kind. Scuttling waif in long nightdress?
Guilt-wracked hypocritical reverend?
As I lay in the high, four-poster bed
Marking midnight on the digital clock,
Watching LEDs blink from my cell phone,
The laptop, and the TV’s complex box,
To the sound of cars and central A/C,
I compared this ghost to an endangered bird,
Her nesting woods cut to shreds by strip malls,
Office parks, and the Interstate, cheeping
Forlornly for a mate. In the sober
Morning light, the lacy lampshade over
The candle-shaped 40-watt GE bulb
Began to rock inexplicably.
I thought: Have you now been reduced to this?
In your own house? Is this what “haunting” means
For you? Trying to catch a stranger’s eye
For an instant as he starts his cluttered day,
Just to say that once you were living too?

Gerard Manley Hopkins, interred
Two lifelengths long in loathèd Irish sod,
Somehow through the raked pebbles heard
A tourist throng his verse applaud.
Straining, he understood the docent say
That he’d been superstitious,
unpublished, bipolar, gay.
Born later, he’d have had his wishes;
Fame, sprung rhythms (think of rap!),
Love for man without the monkish trap.
He thought: this is the end I always mourned for;
This is the blight that I was born for.

Fragments from Emerson’s prose essay “Circles” (1841):

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth
that around every circle another
can be drawn. There is no end in nature,
but every end is a beginning.
There is always another dawn risen
on mid-noon, and under every deep
a lower deep opens. The Greek sculpture
is all melted away. The Greek letters
last a little longer, but are already
passing under the same sentence, tumbling
into the inevitable pit which the
creation of new thought opens for all
that is old. The new continents are built
out of the ruins of an old planet.

The man finishes his story, – how good!
how final! how it puts a new face on
all things! He fills the sky. Lo, on the other side
rises also a man and draws a circle
around the circle we had just pronounced
the outline of the sphere. Then already is
our first speaker not man, but only first
speaker. His redress is forthwith to draw
a circle outside of his antagonist.

In common hours, society sits
cold and statuesque. Then cometh the god
and converts the statues into fiery men,
and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil
which shrouded all things, and the meaning of
the very furniture, of cup and saucer,
or chair and clock and tester, is manifest.

The natural world may be conceived of
as a system of concentric circles,
and we now and then detect in nature
slight dislocations which apprize us that
this surface on which we stand is not fixed,
but sliding.

I am gladdened by beholding that no
evil is pure, nor hell itself without
its extreme satisfactions. But let me
remind the reader that I am only
an experimenter. Do not set the least
value on what I do, or the least discredit
on what I do not, as if I pretended
to settle any thing as true or false.
I unsettle all things, an endless seeker
with no Past at my back.

Tethered sailboats hunched in a row.
A gull sails the diagonal, taut and low.
Wind and sinking sun scribble the bay
With fleeting streaks of blue, green, gray.

No Atlantic lobstermen in my line
(Grim faces leathered from the frozen brine),
Nor any yachtsmen forebears in blue and gold.
I stand uneasy in the twilit cold.

We turn past the point and leave the bay.
The waves foam up and throw the wind their spray,
Soaking the windshields in the ferry’s hold.
I stand alone in the whipping cold.

The harbor was not for me; nor was it theirs.
The whole is no one’s, saved for no one’s heirs.
It’s of no account who I may be.
A life is a wave; it is not the sea.