The Heart of Haiku Read Online Free Page A

bashō tree? The climate here must be good for it—many new trunks have grown up around the first one, their leaves so thick that they crowd my garden and shade my house-eaves. People named my hut after this plant. Every year, old friends and students who’ve grown to like my tree take cuttings or divide the roots and carry them off to replant far and wide.
     One year my heart set itself on a trip to the northern interior, and I abandoned this Bashō Hut. […] My sadness at leaving the tree was surprisingly strong. After five springs and autumns away, I’ve now returned, and my sleeves are wet with tears. The scent of blossoming oranges is near; my friends’ warmth has not changed. There’s no way I’ll leave it behind again.
    My new thatch-roofed cottage, near the site of the earlier one, fits me well, with its three small rooms. […] I’ve transplanted five bashō saplings so that the moon, seen through their branches, will be even more beautiful and moving. The bashō’s leaves are over seven feet long. When they rip almost to their center ribs in the wind, it’s as painful as seeing a phoenix whose tail has been broken, as pitiful as the sight of a torn green fan.
    Sometimes the bashō tree blossoms, but its flowers are small. Its thick stalk remains untouched by any axe. Like the famous ancient tree of the mountains, the bashō’s useless nature is itself the reason to admire it. A monk caressed that mountain tree with his brush to learn its ways; a scholar watched its leaves unfold to inspire his studies. But I’m not like either of them. I just rest in the shade of the leaves I love because they are so easily torn.

    bash ō leaves
    will cover its post-beams—
    hut of the moon          
    bash ō ba o hashira ni kaken  io no tsuki     

    By the time he wrote this, the poet had long been called by the bashō tree’s name, and each of the major themes of his life appears in this dense meditation on the plant whose identity merged with the poet’s own—his restless wanderings and sensual awareness; his transplanter’s impulse toward revision and renewal; his empathic identification with the tree’s fragile leaves; the importance of friendship; the desire for unusual beauty; and the continuing examination of both inner and outer worlds undertaken by seeing through words, both those of earlier writers and his own.
    The aesthetics of spareness and poverty should not disguise the genuine hardship of Bashō’s life. His grass hut, however scenic, had neither a well nor plumbing. In one haibun written late in 1681, Bashō quotes a few lines by the Chinese poet Tu Fu, then says, “I can see the wabi here, but I don’t take any joy in it. I’m superior to Tu Fu in only one thing: the frequency with which I fall sick. Hidden away behind the bashō leaves of this rickety hut, I call myself, ‘Useless Old Bum.’”  One of several accompanying haiku reads:

    Bitter ice-shards         
    moisten
    the mud-rat’s throat.
    kōrinigaku enso ga nodo wo uruoseri  

    The haiku carries a headnote: “I buy water at this grass-roofed hut,” and it alludes to a statement from the Chinese Taoist writings of Chuang-Tzu: A sewer rat drinks only enough from the river to quench its thirst. Bashō’s container of purchased water, which regularly froze during winter nights, may have reminded him of that image. Still, this haiku seems as much a portrait of genuine bitterness as any depiction of Taoist austerity.
    Another haibun from this time, titled “Sleeping Alone in a Grass Hut,” includes this poem:

    the bashō thrashing in wind,
    rain drips into an iron tub—
    a listening night
    bashōnowaki shite tarai ni ame wo kiku yo kana

    The haiku is a study in sounds, textures, and scale, and in exposure, both exterior and interior. The banana tree’s leaves are torn by the typhoon winds—the storm was the fiercest in many years—whose huge sound passes over the poem. The plink of rain against a