We love to travel, but sometimes we can't get away as far as we like. So, for today's Poetry Friday, we'll take a quick haiku-heavy jaunt via Brian Bartlett to "West End, Halifax" (from his collection The Watchmaker's Table).
Reached via social media, Brian had this to say about the work behind his poem:
This haiku montage is one of three in The Watchmaker's Table. Stitching haiku together to create long poems (which I've compared to collages or mosaics) became so much a part of my writing a dozen or so years ago that I went on to publish a whole book of seven more montages, Potato Blossom Road (Ekstasis Editions, 2013). That book also includes an essay, "Haikuing," which details my reflections on this popular but often misunderstood, misrepresented mode of writing—which I've also experienced as a way of thinking, seeing and hearing.
West End, Halifax
In this moist corner
of a used-book store
a lone mushroom sprouts
Two giant zucchini
by a grinning girl’s ears –
green parenthesis
He holds high his rolled-up
Yoga mat, fending off
a crow diving close
The blackout lasts
one second – the neighbourhood
blinks – glimpse of Zilch
Where Dublin St. meets
London St., a soaked atlas
falls apart in grass
Behemoth tree-trimmer spits
limbs into its gut –
noisiest eater around
Garbage night, one hopeful
sound in the dark –
bottle-scavengers’ bag clink
From under ice
in a mid-winter thaw
a worm crawls, earth’s colour
A sort of grace –
a falling icicle strikes
his foot, not his eye
Blizzard-buried,
a locked bicycle’s shrunken
to its red reflector
A maple wingseed
stays stuck to a skate blade
crisscrossing a rink
Two bootprints frozen
in sidewalk ice, one pointing
down the street, one up
Through twelve months
a scarecrow on a porch gives
each season the same scowl
Oh for X-rays to show
all the trees roots holding
these streets together