Haiku your hike

After breakfast, she
Sends me outside to harvest
Poems from the land.

This poem introduces Jack Kraichnan’s just-published book of short poems, Winter to Winter: a year of seasonal change in the Monadnock foothills (Snow Brook Press, 2005).

Trained as a naturalist, Kraichnan takes his daily exercise outdoors and on foot. In late 2002, he committed himself to producing a certain number of poems during each walk, using the three-line, 5-7-5-syllable meter of traditional Japanese haiku as his form. Winter to Winter incorporates the best of the haiku Kraichnan wrote during and after walking the same five-mile loop through Dublin from mid-December, 2002, to mid-December, 2003.

Kraichnan says he didn’t intend to write a book, but simply to use haiku as an interior discipline to complement the physical discipline of walking. “I wrote the poems as a sort of journal,” he says. “They contain both what I observed and what I associated with those observations. Diane [Kraichnan’s wife] read them, liked them, and organized them to create the book.”

Kraichnan encountered all types of weather during his year of daily walks. “In our increasingly developed and engineered world, weather is one of the last forces of Nature left wild,” he writes. “Being outside in it for a year was a gift.”

Writing within the rigorous demands of the haiku format “forced me to distil my thoughts,” writes Kraichnan. “I was rigorously honest in recording what my senses perceived, and resisted altering reality even slightly to accommodate an easy turn of phrase.”

On their surface, haiku report some observation or experience of nature. The best of them invoke deep emotional and spiritual resonances that readers experience directly, without the mediation of figurative or explicitly symbolic expressions. My favorite from Kraichnan’s Winter to Winter collection:

Beneath snow and ice
In dark of pond’s still water
Turtles are waiting.

I love this idea of combining physical activity with a writing discipline as Kraichnan has done. Over nearly four decades, including 18 years as a serious competitive triathlete, I’ve walked, hiked, run, biked, snowshoed, and swum thousands of miles, almost all of it across the familiar woods and roadways near my home, in the little pond just outside my kitchen window, or in the half-acre vegetable garden I’ve planted, tended and harvested for 37 seasons.

Like Kraichnan, I’ve learned that our “seasons are not as clearly defined as I had thought,” with each season offering as many micro-seasons as I have encounters with the world outside my walls.

I’ve also learned that the same piece of terrain never looks sounds, feels, or smells the same from one encounter to the next. The feeling of the ground under foot or wheel changes perceptibly as the seasons advance. The scents on the air change, as frozen ground softens to mud, lilacs bloom, a neighbor mows his lawn, a dead woodchuck rots by the roadside in the August heat, fall leaves accumulate, a hard frost stiffens the ground. On my walk today, I heard the groans of frozen trunks and limbs in the winter woods and the rattle of beech leaves still hanging on their branches; tomorrow I’ll hear the whisper of uncut hay in the field, the voices of crows in my compost pile, and the squeals of children playing tag in my neighbor’s yard.

Like Kraichnan’s, my outdoor excursions have provoked me to write many poems, most of them marking rites of passage for me and for loved ones.

When my daughter turned 18 and left home for college, I presented her with a poem titled Rock and a small rock I picked up in our backyard vegetable garden to go with the poem. I spent three months writing Rock, laboring over each word and image, in part because I wanted my child to remember where she came from, but mostly because I needed to work through my own grief and summon the considerable strength I needed to let go.

It snowed the day I received Jack’s book in the mail. Returning home from a long walk, I went to the edge of my small pond. A rim of ice had formed around the edges. A sparrow flew down as if to land, then flew away, leaving me with this poem:

First snow dusts thin ice
Of backyard pond, too thin
For that small sparrow.

Kraichnan writes in his preface, “I offer this book to those who may be trapped inside too often.” Getting outside to exercise and explore can open us to new awareness of body, mind, and spirit.

Making poems about those excursions involves another level of “getting outside.” Committing to the discipline of putting words on paper helps the poet escape the received notions and old frames of reference that also keep us trapped inside.

Yesterday turned cold, windy, and sunless. I took a lunchtime run up Route 4, and came home with this poem:

Dry beech leaf rattling
Across dead, frozen asphalt
Takes wing on the wind.

By Peg Boyles, UNH Cooperative Extension Master Gardener