Embedded Files
First published in Clover: A Literary Rag, #11, June 2016, pages 203–207. Originally written in September of 2006. Clover nominated this poem for a Pushcart Prize in December of 2016, for which I’m grateful. Editor Mary Elizabeth Gillilan describes this poem by saying that “Michael translates an abstract reality into concrete imagery. One you will read over and over.” This is, I suppose, an ars poetica for haiku. See my essay, “Thirteen Ways of Reading Haiku.” See also Melissa Allen’s poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens,” and Ron Padgett’s poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Haiku,” both of which I had not seen why I wrote my poem. I am also reminded of Mary Ruefle, who, in “The Butter Festival,” from Dunce, said, “The fourteenth way of looking at a blackbird is mine.” + +
1
In the morning
after rain
that one green leaf
catching the sun.
2
It’s the tilt of the earth,
I remind myself,
that produces seasons,
cycles of metaphor
for use when a dying man
hasn’t finished loving.
3
Do the words
capture the moment
or become the moment,
the aching swerve of rust
on an old gate hinge?
4
Only when split
in two
does the fresh watermelon
tell its secret.
5
In the sunlit classroom,
the teacher talks and talks of penguins
at the north pole.
6
Your inhalation,
not quite a gasp,
is all I need to know
that my experience
matches yours.
7
You ask me to join you on the porch
to watch the fireflies.
I do not ask for an answer
to the question I have not asked.
8
Why count the grains of sand?
Isn’t it enough
to feel their coolness in shadows,
to dance over their heat
until you reach the surf?
9
When walking, walk.
When sitting, sit.
Above all, don’t wobble.
The poem does not lie.
10
The heart monitor’s monotonous blips . . .
To catch just one
before they end.
To catch just one,
any one,
but the last.
Or maybe
even the last one
will do just fine.
11
When it is dark, I turn on my lamp.
It is because I know
that you do the same thing
that I trust the poem.
12
How can you interpret joy?
The nature of things
is to be what they are.
Classification and dissection
is the scientist’s art.
13
You laugh at the old dog
who brings you his leash,
clenched between his teeth.
That, it seems to the divine,
is more important
than the route you take,
or whether you lead the dog
or the dog leads you.
14
In the evening,
the wind chime can be just as silent
or clangy
as in the morning.
It is all you have to do—
just notice.
15
The canoe rounds the river bend
to show another red-winged blackbird
singing on a bulrush.
It does not matter that you cannot tell
this one from the previous,
or from the next—or even if you can.
What matters is that you lifted the paddle,
lifted it,
and let the canoe glide.
16
There is no escape from self,
the yin and yang
of good and evil,
but to turn to the sun,
the moon, the rain, the blossoms,
the tiniest snowflake
that first falls in autumn.
17
After gossip,
the words dissolve like sugar
into the fragrant tea,
done now,
with steeping.
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