Favor of Crows Read online

  Issa, at age fifty-seven, writes at the end of The Year of My Life, in December 1819, “Those who insist on salvation by faith and devote their minds to nothing else, are bound all the more firmly by their singlemindedness, and fall into the hell of attachment to their own salvation. Again, those who are passive and stand to one side waiting to be saved, consider that they are already perfect and rely rather on Buddha than on themselves to purify their hearts—these, too, have failed to find the secret of genuine salvation. The question then remains—how do we find it? But the answer, fortunately, is not difficult.

  “We should do far better to put this vexing problem of salvation out of our minds altogether and place our reliance neither on faith nor on personal virtue, but surrender ourselves completely to the will of Buddha. Let him do as he will with us—be it to carry us to heaven, or to hell. Herein lies the secret.”36 The motion of twilight, transitory seasons, chance, irony, stray shadows, and rumors of a sense of presence are common sentiments of experience in haiku and anishinaabe dream songs, stories, and contemporary literature.

  Issa, the “poet of destiny,” died eight years later. The frogs continue to croak his name, skinny Issa in the secret marsh, and he is celebrated everywhere by crickets, mosquitoes, flies, many insects, and many birds in the voices of nature and survivance.

  Robert Aitken pointed out in A Zen Wave that any “distinct form of art implies a characteristic vision of completeness, and the completeness of the haiku form, as Bashō perfected it, is not just a matter of brevity and the emphatic arrangement of seventeen syllables. One Western reader said that going through a collection of haiku was like being pecked to death by doves.” Clearly that reader was preoccupied with the intransigent converse of a haiku scene, and failed to notice the precise moment of chance and liberty in a haiku image, and a sense of presence and survivance, not salvation or death by nature.

  Aitken proposed, however, that the disappointment of the unnamed reader “with the haiku collection would not have been allayed by an understanding of that convention. I would guess that it arises from precisely what Bashō himself wanted the form, each instance of it, to be. Not static, as the unsympathetic Western reader might suppose. But dynamic in the manner of a single frame of thought—an instant that is unique, indivisible, and therefore whole.”37

  The motion of the seasons portrayed in haiku scenes is a tease of nature; the imagistic tease of constant natural motion, the bounce, wither, and impermanence of cherry blossoms in the snow, the shiver of the autumn moon on the river, moths in a paper lantern, and the rebound of crows in a sudden storm. These haiku scenes nurture a sense of presence, survivance, and visionary memory.

  The Favor of Crows is a collection of my original haiku scenes, new, selected, and revised from seven of my haiku books published in the past fifty years. My very first book of haiku was a collection of fifty-six scenes, fourteen in each of four seasons, privately printed in a limited edition at the Minnesota State Reformatory in Saint Cloud. I was a recent college graduate and served as a corrections agent or social worker at the time and paid inmates in the print shop to print and saddle stitch a hundred copies of Two Wings the Butterfly in 1962.38 My second book of haiku scenes, Raising the Moon Vines, was published two years later by Callimachus Publishing Company, and reprinted in 1968 and 1999 by Norton Stillman, owner of the Nodin Press in Minneapolis.39

  Seventeen Chirps was published in 1964, a limited hardcover edition printed on laid finish paper and hand bound by the Lund Bindery in Minneapolis.40 The Nodin Press published Slight Abrasions: A Dialogue in Haiku by Gerald Vizenor and Jerome Downs in 1966.41 My fifth book of haiku, Empty Swings, was published in 1967.42 Matsushima: Pine Islands, the first collection of my original haiku scenes, was published in 1984.43 Cranes Arise: Haiku Scenes, my seventh book of haiku, was published in 1999.44

  NOTES

  1. “Haiku Scenes,” the introduction, has been revised and expanded from a shorter version of an essay published as “Haiku Traces” in Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance by Gerald Vizenor (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 257–76.

  2. Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), 115, 116. Translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa.

  3. Makoto Ueda, The Path of Flowering Thorn: The Life and Poetry of Yosa Buson (Stanford University Press, 1998), 1, 16.

  4. R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, Volume One (Japan: Hokuseido, 1963), 7, 8, 40.

  5. Blyth, A History of Haiku, Volume One, 1.

  6. Kenneth Yasuda, The Japanese Haiku (Rutland, Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1957), 24, 32.

  7. Kobayashi Issa, The Year of My Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 103, 104. Oraga Haru, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa.

  8. Stephen Addiss, The Art of Haiku (Boston: Shambhala, 2012), 260.

  9. R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume IV, Autumn-Winter (Japan: Hokuseido, 1952), 230. Blyth wrote, “The poet or someone else has been playing the harp and at last leaves it on the tatami. Standing on the verandah, he gazes out at the rain which has fallen all day. It grows darker and darker. Suddenly, the koto gives out a slight sound; a mouse must have scuttled across it.”

  10. R. H. Blyth, Haiku: Eastern Culture, Volume 1 (Japan: Hokuseido, 1949), 90.

  11. Stephen Addiss, The Art of Haiku, 179.

  12. Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series LXIV, 1959), 247.

  13. Donald Keene, Japanese Literature (New York: Grove Press, 1955), 28, 29.

  14. Frances Densmore, Chippewa Music (Minneapolis: Ross & Haines, 1973), 15.

  15. Gerald Vizenor, Summer in the Spring: Ojibwe Lyric Poems and Tribal Stories (Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1965), 23, 29. Frances Densmore, Chippewa Music.

  16. Frances Densmore, Chippewa Customs (Minneapolis: Ross & Haines, 1970), 78, 79.

  17. François Jullien, The Propensity of Things (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 11, 139, 140, 267.

  18. John DeFrancis, The Chinese Language (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), 78, 92, 93.

  19. Jullien, The Propensity of Things, 16, 143.

  20. Kitaro Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

  21. Blyth, Haiku: Eastern Culture, Volume 1, 343.

  22. Donald Keene, World Within Walls (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), 366. Keene asserted, “Issa is an unforgettable poet, but in the end he leaves us unsatisfied because he so rarely treated serious subjects. As a young man he must have known the horrors of the natural disasters that struck his part of the country, especially the eruption of Asama in 1783, but he never refers to them.”

  23. Gerald Vizenor, Cranes Arise (Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1999).

  24. Vizenor, Summer in the Spring, 25, 29.

  25. Densmore, Chippewa Music, 129, 130.

  26. Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good.

  27. Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, Bollingen Series, 1959), 225.

  28. Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good.

  29. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 1, 272.

  30. Addiss, The Art of Haiku, 170, 171.

  31. Makoto Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters (Stanford University Press, 1991), 4.

  32. Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō (Stanford University Press, 1998), 157, 158.

  33. Ueda, Bashō and His Interpreters, 372.

  34. Gerald Vizenor, Matsushima: Pine Islands (Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1984).

  35. Haruo Shirane, Traces of Dreams, 223.

  36. Issa, The Year of My Life, 139.

  37. Robert Aitken, A Zen Wave (New York: Weatherhill, 1996), 14.

  38. Gerald Vizenor, Two Wings the Butterfly. Privately printed in a limited edition of one hundred copies in the print shop at the Minnesota State Reformatory in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, 1962.

  39. Gerald Vizenor, Raising the Moon Vines (Minneapolis: Callimachus
Publishing Company, 1964). Reprinted by the Nodin Press, Minneapolis, in 1968, and 1999.

  40. Gerald Vizenor, Seventeen Chirps (Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1964, 1968).

  41. Gerald Vizenor, Jerome Downes, Slight Abrasions: A Dialogue in Haiku (Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1966).

  42. Gerald Vizenor, Empty Swings (Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1967).

  43. Gerald Vizenor, Matsushima: Pine Islands (Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1984).

  44. Gerald Vizenor, Cranes Arise (Minneapolis: Nodin Press, 1999).

  mounds of foam

  beneath the waterfall

  float silently

  wooden bucket

  frozen under a downspout

  springs a leak

  early morning

  the old red waterwheel

  starts to squeak

  plum petals

  tumble in the wet snow

  blue feathers

  windy morning

  children under the lilacs

  purple sway

  apple trees

  flower in the ides of march

  snow petals

  cocky wren

  inspects a tiny bird house

  scent of pine

  easter sunday

  children chase the chickens

  moveable tease

  windy night

  acacia brightens a park bench

  morning service

  dreamy anhinga

  wings spread in the sunlight

  fish stories

  march morning

  meadowlarks on a fence post

  change of music

  catalpa flowers

  scatter around a black cat

  noisy birds

  abandoned windmill

  locked with rust over the well

  creaks in a storm

  warm rain

  heartens the early tulips

  dance of colors

  thick ice

  melts on a sandy beach

  bright leaves

  white catalpa

  decorate the wet sidewalk

  parade of doves

  garden mice

  scurry over the petals

  gentle rain

  broken ice

  bears the veins of oak leaves

  fade away

  young raccoons

  secure the old gardens

  block by block

  straw mounds

  cover the new flower beds

  shelter the mice

  slivers of ice

  chatter on the sandy shore

  cautious birds

  bright tulips

  blue shadows on the snow

  spring favors

  warm rain

  sway of concerts in the oaks

  mockingbirds

  calm lake

  children dabble on the dock

  cautious minnows

  ice storm

  new leaves shimmer overnight

  words undone

  maple beetles

  dance outside the window

  cat paws inside

  gentle breeze

  petals land in a rain barrel

  sailboats

  park bench

  great blue trees in the snow

  sundown shadows

  dogwood petals

  scattered in a gust of wind

  faces in a pool

  calico kittens

  circle a saucer of milk

  garden stones

  paper boats

  float with the street pirates

  late for school

  old woman

  sneezes at the garden gate

  lilacs in bloom

  gentle rain

  brightens the tangled shrubs

  swarm of juncos

  mighty birds

  weave a nest with horse hair

  caught on a fence

  plastic kite

  entangled in a cottonwood

  rattles overnight

  woodpeckers

  sound of maple sugar taps

  separate trees

  double rainbow

  rises out of the prairie

  school recess

  fish houses

  gather one morning on shore

  cracks in the ice

  long underwear

  surges on a windy clothesline

  crows caw caw

  moonlight

  shadows grow in the garden

  bright daffodils

  windy boat dock

  kites bounce over leech lake

  birds of prey

  city boy

  rides a weary draft horse

  twice to the barn

  abandoned dock

  gray posts and fishermen

  some with hats

  american crows

  hopscotch over the garbage

  customary court

  march moon

  bounces on the river ice

  chunks afloat

  late storm

  tender faces in the snow

  primroses

  hilly path

  stout man and a fat bulldog

  out of breath

  empty sleeves

  moths arise from a scarecrow

  twilight tease

  earthworms

  slither under the park swings

  heavy rain

  stone crossing

  even the birds sing loudly

  over the rapids

  shiny crows

  march on the railroad tracks

  sprouted grain

  black clouds

  crows parade on the boat dock

  crash of waves

  rain clouds

  float in a great convoy

  birds in the reeds

  tiger cat

  leaps to catch a firefly

  blinked twice

  dogwood flowers

  tremble in a thunderstorm

  children at play

  spring leaves

  turn in a gentle rain

  clumsy sparrow

  whole moon

  mongrels bark at the shadows

  sounds in the marsh

  gentle breeze

  yellow cat waits on the porch

  anemones spring

  early morning

  scruffy old man blew his nose

  under the lilacs

  lavender wisteria

  brighten the cast iron gate

  locked overnight

  white butterflies

  flutter over the bridal wreath

  enchanted flight

  city sparrows

  chatter in the lilacs

  rites of passage

  gray morning

  only the bright daffodils

  change the weather

  apple blossoms

  disguise the muddy paths

  heavy rain

  bright dandelions

  mark the grassy playground

  natural crowns

  may moon

  blinks between the puffy clouds

  faces alight

  memorial day

  raccoons on a garden tour

  honor guards

  cherry blossoms

  ride on the black umbrellas

  natural display

  river shore

  bright beams of morning light

  break on the waves

  crescent moon

  adrift in the rain clouds

  breaks away

  blue herons

  tease bashō in the shallows

  spring waders

  bright moon

  boys stone the water tower

  return chatter

  ladybirds

  parade on the birdfeeder

  tricky choice

  giant lilacs

  swollen with overnight rain

  solemn scent

  golden eagles

  circle over the horses

  prairie sunset


  morning glories

  cover the broken fence

  delayed repairs

  scruffy sparrows

  chatter outside the bakery

  raisin scones

  gentle rain

  cat asleep on the front porch

  doves in the eaves

  birch leaves

  bear the radiance of the sunset

  favor of crows

  spider webs

  enhance the wooden fence

  gentle rain