with a woman named Leila. Each “Prelude” is then followed by a number of impressionistic narrative prose sketches that evoke either the narrator’s experiences while canoeing in nature over the course of three seasons or his problematic relationship with Leila. Finally, each section closes with a group of haiku, from eight to nineteen in number, some relating directly to the prose sketches.
Canadian haiku poet Willmot edited the anthology Erotic Haiku (1983), and Ribs of Dragonfly propels itself in part from the erotic drive of the narrator’s relation with Leila, whose name links her to Eastern concepts of illusion. That drive is manifested in the longing of this haiku:
bathing, I think of you
and lift the straw blind
to the rain20
The narrative theme of adultery that supports this drive is evoked compellingly in the following:
lying beside you
thinking of her hair
all night the cries of gulls21
Though the narrative of the relationship is at times overdrawn and melodramatic, the power of these and similarly erotic haiku carry half the haibun, beginning with the first of such haiku, which occurs in the group appended to the work’s first section:
she hugs me from behind
my face in the steam
of the potatoes22
The other half of the haibun is carried by the impressionistic prose sketches of nature, which will prompt the narrator to an exploration of the nature of consciousness, such as this from the first section:
Silence.
On the horizon, drab sketches in olive and sepia of conifers and cottage woodlots. Ice-huts here and there, too distant for motion to be discerned among them or in their tiny plumes of smoke. The ice impassive now, no longer apprenticed to the rhythms of cold as when it boomed and sang responsively. Master of silence in its death. The water, at times wholly reflection, at times pure darkness, at times more silvery than ice. And over everything, the shroud.
Stillness, even in me: a void between each breath where I linger heedlessly, accepting. Yet movement. A fragrance melting. Movement I could smell.23
The perceptual silence and stillness of the passage, a prologue to an engagement with a Zen-like consciousness in the work, is echoed in this haiku from the same section:
mail on the counter
sits unopened
afternoon sun through birches24
This consciousness, which in Willmot is usually linked with sensuousness, reaches a synthesis of sorts through the psychological dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity described in a late section of the work:
I have felt foreign to the world, honoring its mask of oneness and certitude. But now I see that it is me, or my portrait, endlessly shifting as I do. My infinite anatomy. Then am I so miserable as I seem? Everything I’ve seen or touched has been a sketch of my insides. That field of rotting cabbages in snow, malodorous, but with a dance of pheasant-tracks stitched among the rows, elegant and clean. Those crystal “berries” in a chunk of porphyry, rock within rock and unpluckable, until I tossed it into a pond and received, startled, the resonant fruit of sound. And the mossy woods along the coast where we searched all morning for the source of a strange perfume, until its very hiddenness became a kind of mushroom, edible, that grew within our heads.
Which of us maps the other, World?
Birch-leaves, trembling as I watch them.25
The enigmatic nature of this synthesis of inner and outer reality that is held in Zen-like stillness while yet being presidingly sensuous is movingly exhibited in one of the haiku following this passage:
amid the wild rice
chewing
the bittern’s stillness26
But for all the monumental depth of its exploration of such consciousness, Ribs of Dragonfly is still explorative, if sentimental, fiction, and, unlike the haiku in Desolation Angels and almost all American haibun, its appended haiku for the most part relate to the general mood of the work as a whole and not to the specific section to which they are appended.
Another ambitious chapbook-length haibun is Vincent Tripi’s Haiku Pond: A trace of the trail... and Thoreau (1987). The work, all of whose profits go to the Thoreau Society, represents an act of spiritual communion with Thoreau and his vision as expressed in Walden. The work consists of Tripi’s journal entries and haiku relating to Walden Pond, Thoreau’s spirit, and present-tense nature from the spring of 1984 to the autumn of 1985. Thus the work adheres to Thoreau’s temporal structure for Walden, although Tripi’s journal entries are not in chronological order. This material is interspersed with quotations from Thoreau and sumi-like paintings. Tripi conceives of each page as producing a haiku-like aesthetic whole. As he notes in his Introduction: “Each page becomes a ‘picture’—the pond ‘infinity,’ the symbols ‘life,’ and the poems and art ‘the spark’ that makes them one.”27 The connection of the given page to the “haiku moment” is then made explicit: “The ‘pictures’ when settled are themselves moment-to-moment awakenings of mind... a passing of water in the night.’”28
The communion with Thoreau is introduced in the first entry of the first of the four sections of Haiku Pond. On this page Tripi creates his imagined invitation to communion by quoting from Thoreau’s Journal: “I should be pleased to meet a man in the woods. I wish he were encountered like wild caribous and moose.”29 Tripi responds as that man with an entry from his own journal: “Solitude was the face in whose smile... my eyes began to find themselves again.”30 The source of that solitude, the experiment recorded in Walden, is illustrated on the next page with a drawing of Walden Pond. The following page continues this dialogue with an entry from Thoreau on solitude, followed by a haiku and journal entry by Tripi, which consider Thoreau’s and Tripi’s own relation to Walden Pond as a focus for meditation and higher consciousness in nature.
This consciousness is firmly established for Tripi in the second section. One page from this section inserts this haiku between quotations from Thoreau’s Journal on the visual clarity of nature at sunset and on guarding one’s spiritual purity:
White moon,
Snowman’s shadow
Gone.31
Tripi, like the snowman without a shadow, has attained a purity of spirit that is selflessly united with nature. The haiku is followed by Tripi’s journal entry, which is a haibun, entitled “The Way of Spruce,” that exhibits this purity of consciousness that fuses itself completely with external nature:
The way of spruce begins to glisten. Sleeper in things, the green-wet woodsmoke disappears.
It is enough to fill myself with clouds. A speckled alder, a broken willow...from the bottom.
Woodsmoke—
Dusk
In the grass-spider’s web.32
In the second paragraph
