After Basho

Catty-corner to the supermarket is a house that has been under remodel for years.

At some point (on purpose?) all of the trees and shrubbery in the front and side yards were burned down to the soil and today there is still this menacing little forest of burnt and blackened wooden fingers ringing the home.

It could be the Baba Yaga’s hut but for the all-too mundane flotsam scattered here and there on the property: here a used gillete razor, there a single sneaker (left foot), and on the driveway adjacent, a crumpled and water-logged Star magazine (Lisa Marie Presley - pregnant!).

In any case, I walk past it whenever I walk to the supermarket.

Today, on the sidewalk alongside the house, scrawled in charcoal from one of the skeletal burnt treebranches, in a rounded and feminine hand, I found a haiku:

A cloudless sky
An old sun
and some lavender

I smiled to see it and continued back to my house with my dry cleaning (thirty dollars?!).

When I got home, I went to my book of haiku and then to the net to see if this was some transcription, maybe by a zealous student of literature. I didn’t find anything and decided it must have been an original composition. Literary urban graffiti.

Charmed, I left the house and walked back to the haiku corner determined to leave one of my own.

I found a good sized chunk of charred wood and set to scratching my little poem on the concrete. I felt exposed and pretentious and altogether unhappy with the whole project, but I did it.

It is supposed to rain tomorrow, but, for the time being, you can find my haiku, and the mysterious girl’s as well, on the northeast corner of F street and 6th Avenue.

My haiku:

A poet’s words
Quick motions of the wrist
Tomorrow the rain