Rocky Mountain High. From the fractured haiku collection.
I did,
I do every damn day.
Do you?
At St Mary’s Glacier, off I-70, past Idaho Springs, five miles or so up Fall River Road, at 10.000 feet and climbing. The doing is going somewhere new.
October 2025
On a walk or a run,
Thirty minutes is nothing,
— Time Flies
— Bashō no yōna
Zen is many things to many people, the slowing down of time, the sensation of the world around you, what on might call ultimate reality, the absolute, disconnected from the cell phone, in tune with Nature. On a run at Pawnee Prairie Park in May. The lake is full, beside the lake the yellow Iris are in bloom. In the lake the turtles rest on logs as ducks and their ducklings swim by. And as you near the water’s edge, the frogs click before they jump into the water. Ker-plop!
Upon a withered branch
A crow has stopped this
Autumn evening
Kareeda ni/ Karasu no tomarikeri/ Aki no kure
枯枝に烏のとまりけり秋の暮
Matsuo Bashō has by the autumn of 1680 now achieved fame. Moreover, he has just moved from Edo across the Sumida River to the Fukagawa neighborhood where he lives in a simple hut with a new banana tree, a gift from a student. A bridge had yet to be built across the river.
At the age of 36 Bashō was experiencing what we would call a Mid-Life crisis, he was cut off, dissatisfied, and lonely. In a couple of years he would begin his epic journey to the North. But for now, he took up the practice of Zen meditation, but it seems not to have calmed his mind.
This haiku has more than 30 published and hundreds of online translations. Why so many variations? Why so many attempts?
The answer, I suppose, lies in Zen’s ineffability. For Zen’s essence is to understand directly Life’s Meaning, without being misled by language. Life is what we view directly, no more, no less.
Bashō sees a crow perched upon a withered branch. It is autumn, more precisely, an autumn evening as the dusk settles in and darkness descends. The air is still or perhaps there is a gentle breeze. Then a crow stops upon a withered branch. Its crow and tree become one color against the ever deepening blue of the evening sky.
Bashō, like the crow, stops for a moment. And in that suspended moment this haiku is formed.
Do I need to say that the crow is a bad omen? In Japan, there is a belief that if a crow settles on the roof of a house and begins cawing, a funeral will soon follow. Did the gloomy Bashō foresee his own death? Did Basho in his own unique way presage Yates who wrote, “An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick.” Is there not a little of Edgar Allen Poe’s Raven to be heard tapping at one’s door?
A melancholy thought, for which I have little to add other than that I love the repetition of the “k” throughout the haiku which must bring to mind the cawing that Bashō must have heard.
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