Orion Magazine - March-April 2008

then turned to look at David and me, and decreed: “Nay-nay. Nay-nay.” Now that’s a horse.

Seventeenth-century haiku master Basho would’ve rendered that anecdote in a three-line poem, perhaps something like—

Small boy
made smaller
in the horse’s eye.

—but more precise, of course, more resonant. Because the haiku is wedded to “the instant” and to speed of comprehension, it serves as an ideal poetic net for the mind hoping to capture such minnow-quick moments of ba<ement or awe. And because a good haiku mirrors the swiftness of the world it describes, the result is often a paradoxical slowing down that allows poet and reader alike to meditate on a single intrepid moment. Picking morels today with one eye on the ground and one eye on Luka, I keep thinking that the haiku poets, with their uncanny sense of detail—Beads of dew / on the caterpillar’s / hair, wrote Buson—would have made amazing morel hunters. But Issa, who was enamored of children, chides my task-oriented brain in the face of Luka’s goallessness:

The moon and the flowers— forty-nine years,

walking around, wasting time.

Better to keep my eyes tuned to my young Sherpa, spirit compass:

Closer to levitating than any monk—

boy gazing at hovering hawk.

Some days the double-layered paper grocery bag that is the heart, or the heart’s memory, brims over with images such as these: moments of kana at Luka’s kana, his amazement at the everyday (use the commonplace to escape the commonplace, Buson wrote). And some days I can feel Luka’s wonder spurring me into deeper relation with the world, despite the too easily found ironies and horrors that tend to knock my romantic impulse on its rump and cause me to retreat into a spiritual hesitancy. This morning, for instance, I can’t stop wondering if the soil from which my beloved morels have grown is laced with the same mine-tailings—arsenic and lead—that have made the upper portion of our valley an EPA Superfund site: the irony of the organic meal that leaves toxic grins on the foraging family’s lips. This line of thinking quickly gains a dangerous momentum.

Gripped by casual cynicism, I pull back, disengage. But the boy’s moment-to-moment discoveries pull me back in, drag me, the way he’s dragging behind him a newly found whitetail antler: Come along, now. Toppling the coveted morels ($35 per pound in Chicago markets!) as he goes, he is either in a daze of boredom or he is walking kana, penetrated each step by the world, not penetrating it. It’s tempting to call this spirit naïveté, but it’s not: it’s wisdom we lose along the way. Polish poet and Holocaust survivor Czeslaw Milosz echoed this dichotomy when he wrote:

Pure beauty and benediction: You are all I gathered from a life that was bitter and confused, in which I learned about evil, my own and not my own. Wonder kept seizing me, and I recall only wonder.

I know the world is dying from my eyes, and that my a=ection for the world contributes to its destruction. I know also that it is emotionally safer to lie estranged beneath the false warmth of cynicism’s down comforter each morning rather than venture into the world with a posture of openness, ready to receive, to live, rather than simply emote. Yet here I am, for starters, walking atop centuries of dead cottonwood leaves, while overhead new buds, sticky to the touch, smell like this: a sweet long-steeped tea, the sweaty neck of a lover, an infant’s head. Last night, after soothing a nightmare-stricken Luka, I fell asleep alone on the couch and dreamed I was still holding his small frame to my chest: his heartbeats, beating into my heart, sent a raw blue wind pulsing through my dream-body—I awoke quickened, a layer of the in>nitely layered veil blown away.

Now, just now, Luka scrambles out from underneath a deadfall he’s been referring to as his cave and hands a brittle leaf to me: “And a mushroom!”

“Oh—thank you,” I say, and place the leaf with what we’ve gathered: a heaping load of morels, a bright orange ?icker feather, a few rocks, a fork-horn whitetail shed.

Midafternoon—sun high, birds loud, dewdrops hard to >nd— Luka’s nap is calling. I zip the bulging paper bag inside my backpack so our cache won’t spill when we wade the river channel again. We’ll cross the river and still be here, our existence intensi>ed through our attention to the particular moments we inhabit.