I drive with the windows down, first time this year, to pick her up from school. Robin’s egg sky, the sun the yolk. When we get home, she streams a five-minute lesson about the Roman Empire—five good emperors, two bad, two in between—while devouring mochi, which she’s loved ever since Grandma Mori started taking her and her brother to the food court at the Japanese marketplace whenever we’d visit. After dinner we watch a movie. Miyazaki’s are her favorite, so we replay them together when she’s over, whenever we can, before I drive her back to her mom’s house.
fox cub’s lope
across a moonlit mountain road
eyeshine
Chihiro’s just a couple of years younger than my daughter when her parents turn into pigs. As the animal-spirits of the ghost town surround her, she welcomes the faceless one. Ranging about the bathhouse, she saves Haku, the river dragon she has befriended, from himself. She rescues her parents, though to them all this has transpired in a brief interval during which their daughter has simply run off. Covered in dust and leaves, their car’s neglected appearance confirms another reality as they head toward their new home.
leaf green
praying mantis pauses
then moves on
is a professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz, where he has been teaching for eighteen years after earning a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, Earthen (Finishing Line Press, 2023); a study of John Milton’s poetry, The End of Learning (Routledge, 2006); and over two dozen scholarly articles. Lately, he has been teaching long poems from the European tradition and writing short ones after the Japanese tradition.
His own poems long and short have recently appeared in Bennington Review, Blithe Spirit, The Briar Cliff Review, Connecticut River Review, Contemporary Haibun Online, Drifting Sands Haibun, The Haibun Journal, Presence, and elsewhere. His haibun “Skyline” (The Haibun Journal 4.2, 2022) was recently longlisted for the first Touchstone Award for Individual Haibun.
