Issue # 14 : January - June 2011

John Labella

Durga by the Tower
Definitions of Hokku
Chisel

Durga by the Tower

        The sun fey,
sky tin, and
        low sea dun.

        But not sad?
Not sad: mad,
        sun ate sea.

        And sky, too?
Mad but shy,
        sky ate sky.

        Can you say
how? Ask him,
        ask the mad.

        Did she eat?
May sun and
        she eat you.

Mad you are,
        not sun not
sky, but you.

And why not
        you red eye?
you tin ear?

        Sun and caw
are one ‘mid
        all the sea

but you—Who?
        You and you
are not one.

Definitions of Hokku

Hokku or haiku are a secretive bunch
but do what they like in the open.

As three lines cost a penny a thought,
pay in monostich for a better deal.

If watching a heron is outmoded hokku,
what of the haiku inside your toys?

To contend with one is to have or be:
if in a pond haiku should fall, drop the if.

Rooms with hokku are anything but.
In hokku hour—there is nowhere to run!

Beyond Nihonbashi, hipsters write haiku
at the dawn of Chinese globalization:

each day ends like the last workshop—
too many hokku, and so little time.

Chisel

1.
After Lazaro was wrapped,
rock sealed shut,
and blind men pressed

hard against the real,
bruising the effect, crushing,
what in place of

words repaired
a sown limb, a mule, another
Lazaro on a cart?

2.
“Ohren auf dem baum,”
sang an Orpheus,
arms scattered in the weeds.

The rest is known
but hard to read this late:

“Revolu,” smearing
a wall in Salvador, 1980;

shard chosen
when other big nouns failed
beside “o Muerto.”

3.
A bearded man, limbs
slack, weeping
beside the rubble of a horse.

Faint breath:
“Even the dead are unsafe.”
Too much

of everything that survived
gleams like apocrypha.