
Haiku – Asymptote
すいちゅう か ば も ぼたんゆき
水中の河馬が燃えます牡丹雪
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A bathing hippo
blazes—
snowflowers.
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hippo
bathing ⊕ burning
snowflake
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A hippo immersed in water
is & is not
a snowflake on fire.
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inside water
the river horse
burning snowflakes
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That smoldering hippo! That snowflake, burning.
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The elliptical lines or orbits trace the way the words in this poem interact with one another. There is movement here. The poem is a living thing. Especially the largest ellipse traces the path of a planet traveling around its sun: it heats and cools. There is a relationship between snow and water and fire. When water is furthest from heat, it recools, recoils. Similarly, a hippo is a river horse, an animal whose house is of water. A cluster of snowflakes is a male animal of the earth. It is also snow. It is also a flower. A male horse gets fired up. When this occurs, it is enough to melt the snow. It is enough to set the river on fire.
はるかぜ はは し りゅうかくさん ち
春風に母死ぬ龍角散が散り
How’re you, Cassini? Ha ha! (she knew). Are you coxswain? Got cheery.
harukaze ni haha shinu ryûkakusan ga chiri
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To the spring wind—
mother is dead,
her medicine scatters.
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mother is scattered
on the spring wind
her medicine breath
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What dissipates—
mother’s death on the spring wind;
medicine called “scattered dragon”
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spring scattering
wind
mother
dead (medicine)
dragon
corner
scatter
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そら
バッタとぶアジアの空のうすみどり
Bat a toe, boo! Ah, gee, uh . . . no. Sorta’. No it’s you, my diary!
batta tobu ajia no sora no usumidori
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A grasshopper hops—
the weak-green sky of Asia.
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O grasshopper, leaping into the watery-green sky of Asia.
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A child’s reading of grasshopper—
green Asian sky without
the complexity of Asia
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Lacking the grasshopper’s hoppers—
the green sky of Asia thins.
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Language declines—
the grasshopper becomes less grasshopper.
The green of Asia’s sky less green.
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か じ
たんぽぽのぽぽのあたりが火事ですよ
Ten Popo, no Popo, no! Atari god. Cagey, the show.
tanpopo no popo no atari ga kaji desuyo
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Surrounding the tanpopo’s popo—fire!
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The mane of the dandelion’s lion is burning.
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Both word and object—
a dandelion blazes.
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The fire pops—
inside the dandelion
a steam locomotive.
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A dandelion bursts—
fire spreads.
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A dandelion, once it has d(r)ied, is held together by a preponderance of parachute pods. They part and pop, as fire does, in play and on the planes of prairied minds. The tanpopo’s popo is the dandelion’s lion, but it is also the pop of Pop-Rocks, the pip of pomegranate, the chugga chugga of the choo-choo. A train engineer is a popo-ya, shushu-popo the child’s word for locomotive, popo-popo-popo the sound a train makes moving across an empty field. A 1603 Jesuit Japanese dictionary lists poppo as “the manner in which steam or fire rises.” But in Japanese, tanpopo is not onomatopoetic until Tsubouchi makes it so. Popo itself is a wordless word, it is the seed of a word, a seed which bursts into flame as soon as it is spoken. Imagine a great gust of wind. Imagine a fire.
Haiku 1 and 2 excerpted from Rakka Rakujitsu (Kaifusha, 1984), 3 from Neko no Ki (Chusekisha, 1987), and 4 from Popo no Atari (Chusekisha, 1998), by permission of Nenten Tsubouchi, Kaifusha, and Chusekisha.
『落下落日』(海風社、1984)より2句(水中の〜、春風に〜)、『猫の木』(沖積舎、1987)より1句(バッタ飛ぶ〜)、『ぽぽのあたり』(沖積舎、1998)より1句(たんぽぽの〜)を、坪内捻典氏、海風社、沖積舎の許可を得て掲載。