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Haiku Guy

ONCE UPON A TIME

In Old Japan, deep in mountains by a lake that froze half the year, where loads of snow piled like top hats on the heads of weary cows; where gray slush filled deep ditches along the Shogun's snaking highway to more important places; in a land of snow where snow melted to the whispery tune of mid-summer's enormous mosquitoes; in a poor province, a downtrodden land where farmers tried to forget the rice tax as they passed the sake, sang the songs, and took turns simmering in hot tubs, cauldrons of steamy water that turned grimmer and browner with each bony, naked bather. It was here, in a village that has never shown up on a Western map and probably never will, in a small, thatched farmhouse on a hill of snow-dusted pines. Heaven's river of stars, the Milky Way, sluiced through the blackness above, pouring cold light onto an old, cracked, soot-blackened door.

A man stooped over his walking stick, shiny-bald, pot-bellied, boots skidding on ice. After forty years of wandering the countryside, crisscrossing the provinces, an aimless drifter, a wind-blown spirit, was home.

He called himself Cup-of-Tea; this was his pen name. Or you might say it was his bamboo-brush name, since he didn't own a pen. In any case, it was the name he scribbled in blotchy calligraphy on the rice paper of fat diaries, crammed with thousands of one-line, one-breath, epics...for Cup-of-Tea was a poet of haiku.

You might be wondering: What is haiku? Now there's a blank not easily filled. To do so, we must observe Cup-of-Tea closely: how he slurps his pond-snail soup, how he pisses zigzag out the back door writing riddles in dawn ice, how he nibbles his noodles by the light of a solitary lamp in deepest winter seclusion.

We'll watch. We'll listen. Maybe, we'll learn.

BUCK-TEETH

"Excuse me, sir, but is it true you are a poet?"

Cup-of-Tea gazed down from his perch high in the black pine. Someone peered up at him through wet branches, more boy than man. More-Boy-Than-Man was dressed in the typical dull clothes of the province and conspicuously polite. Unsure whether to bow or to gaze up at the grown man swaying in the branches above him, More-Boy-Than-Man alternated between deferential bows to the earth and inquisitive glimpses to the sky, where Cup-of-Tea lazily sprawled.

"Yes, boy. I'm Cup-of-Tea."

"Nice, nice to meet you!" He bowed once more toward the puddled mud, and then, craning his neck way back, broke into a huge smile of misplaced teeth.

"I'm Deba, village poet!" he gushed. "Nice to meet you, Master Cup-of-Tea!"

"Village poet, eh? And with a fine bamboo-brush name. Did you give yourself this name?" Deba in Japanese means "Sticking-Out-Teeth." The closest translation in English would be "Buck-Teeth."

Buck-Teeth was politely inspecting his muddy clogs, so Cup-of-Tea could not hear his reply. It didn't matter. Cup-of-Tea could guess the story. This bright peasant lad, son of farmers whose universe stretched as far as the property line, had been teased all his life because he was gentle, because he had sticking-out teeth, and because, thanks to inexplicable karma from the misty beginnings of time all the way up to the present moment in which he now stood, not quite a man, under a rain-slicked black pine in front of Cup-of-Tea's house...Buck-Teeth was a poet, or at least, believed he was.

The older poet clambered down to terra firma and invited the younger one into the house. Cup-of-Tea, true to his name, served tea. They knelt across from each other and sipped.

"So, what kind of poet are you, Buck-Teeth?"

"A poet of haiku, sir. But..." He stared into his tea, as if ashamed. "My family needs me in the fields. Or else I'd do what you did, leave this shitty town and go to Edo!"

Cup-of-Tea slurped his green brew, his mind flitting over well-worn images of his arrival in Edo four decades ago. He had quickly joined a horde of ragtag street children from the sticks. They had begged and thieved to stay alive. Most were unwanted back home; all were soon disillusioned. The Shogun's capital turned out not to be the city of gold they had dreamed of, but a sprawling, disease-ridden, foul-smelling, rat-infested sewer of taverns and brothels, where mad-drunk samurai made geisha scream and exercised their legal right to cut, even kill, any peasant boy they didn't like the looks of.

"Ah, yes...Edo." Cup-of-Tea broke the long silence of his reverie. "But you don't need to go there to write haiku."

"Yes. But Master Cup-of-Tea, you did!"

Cup-of-Tea changed the subject. "Recite me a poem, your best poem."

Buck-Teeth's face brightened with wide, sparkling eyes, teeth thrusting out in a smile. He wore his heart on his sleeve, as they say, the emotion of each moment easily readable in his open-book face.

"With pleasure, sir! I wrote this haiku one full-moon night in my father's rice field. A cat was staring at me from a ditch. At first I didn't know it was dead. Its eyes reflected the moonlight. Then I saw its body was stiff, half of it under the black water. Well, here it is:

in the dead cat's eyes
harvest
moons."

Cup-of-Tea closed his eyes as tightly as he could, fighting an inward battle. He fought this battle so intensely, his face turned plum-blossom crimson while Buck-Teeth gasped in terror. Had his poem been so bad as to send the sensitive master into a seizure? Cup-of-Tea's face clenched in such a tense, red grimace, it reminded Buck-Teeth of those scowling guardian monsters who flank the gates of temples.

Finally, composed but still flushed, the master opened his eyes. He refilled their cups with hot green tea, but said nothing. Buck-Teeth's haiku dangled in the air like a desperate question. Then Cup-of-Tea broke the silence with a simple sentence that made the young poet's easy-to-read face dazzle once again, all shining eyes and pushed-out, smiling overbite.

"Buck-Teeth, you will be my student."

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