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The Seasons - four haibun

The haibun is a form developed in seventeenth-century Japan, consisting of a paragraph of prose followed by a haiku, a short poem of seventeen syllables which usually mentions a season of the year.

The Seasons - Spring
Jack carefully lowered the needle onto the surface of the spinning vinyl. From somewhere out back came the sound: the Miles Davis quartet playing 'Autumn Leaves'. It was ages before the track got going - some drum doodle - then it took off like a rocket. But they were dead now, Jack reckoned. Susie had borrowed a red and white check jacket that suited the period, late forties. Jack had brought a rubber turkey, Dinky had invested in a hollow pumpkin with a candle inside. They went through the motions, mouthing the great playwright's words, while a bushel of copper-toned foliage cascaded over their shoulders and whirled around their feet. Maybe if they wished hard enough, Jack thought to himself, maybe they would find themselves seated around a little table out the front of the Café de Flore in - say - September 1953, drinking black coffee and green Chartreuse, laughing and arguing about whether Susie should have flirted with that writer at the publisher's party the night before. Of course she should! Then the audience went quiet, and the lights dimmed. Ah, how lovely! How rare the bubbles of air, wobbling up to the blue ceiling!

A baby sparrow
falls to the footpath outside
'Dirty Girls Revue'.

The Seasons - Summer
Rodney twined a length of tartan ribbon around the sleigh bells on the reindeer's collar and paused, rubbing his stomach. Why had he ordered a second dozen at the Oyster Bar? He was developing a paunch. The staff had free access to the gym on Tuesdays; why didn't he use it? Tartan - some people call it 'plaid'. And they call plaits 'braids', and they call braid... That new junior - what was his name? Brad? Chad? He kept himself trim, all right. Tod, that was it! Tod had sipped his chilled frontignac, the glass beaded with moisture, Tod had traced a heart with his fingertip, Tod had glanced at Rodney across the oyster shells with a promise in his eyes - smoky grey eyes, with a glow of blue in the depths. But if he'd flirt with me - Rodney smoothed his toupee - if he'd have me, he'd have anybody, and who wants a slut like that? He felt his mouth pulling down at the corners. I do, that's who. He looked out through the plate glass, past the streams of pedestrians. Hyde Park was busy with Christmas shoppers. Wrappers and newspapers blew around their feet. There were lots of Japanese among the crowd, he noticed with pleasure, eating hot dogs and licking ice-cream cones. One old oriental gentleman, his forehead shaded from the fierce sun by a golf cap, was holding up a scrap of paper and reading something he'd written on it to a lady, probably his wife:

On the path, a snake
fast asleep. High on a branch
a shy morsel sings.

The Seasons - Autumn
The flowers wilted under the studio lights, and Jerry sweated. His client, the Tokyo Girl Suspenders, wanted the freshest flowers, the juiciest leaves. He ran around with a little spray can of green paint and a copy of the TLS, touching things up. The Polaroids were awful - the emulsion had gone stale, and the model had some disease that made her skin go funny in the heat... whose voice was that, on the answering machine? Kathy? Uh... look, boss, the crop's coming on fine, the little tips are breaking through the soil of the solarium even as we speak. No one has ever managed to grow coca plants in Hackensack before... now spinning down into the void... no, not Tuesday, Bruno's doing me a new version of the script, in the first draft the guy dies of a stroke or something, it takes ages, I ask you, who is going to pay good money to watch some old fuck take an hour to die... now looking out the window so intently that you seem to shoot forward through the glass into the warm air high above the noise of traffic and out over the river... no, Proust he ain't. No, no Ode to Spring, no Rose is a Rose, no nothing. Say hullo to Harry for me. Hey, sweetheart, could you lay those Polaroids out under the sun lamp for five minutes?

The scotch melts its ice.
Sunset on snow: eiderdowns
aflame in the street.

The Seasons - Winter
You look for that new Country & Western station at the Uptown end of the dial, hunting through the ads for hair cream and Japanese motor scooters. One. Homer describes the Shield of Achilles in Book Eighteen of the Iliad. Two. Alexander Pope translates Homer into English. Many years later, an ambitious souvenir wholesaler orders five gross of tiny bronze shields modeled on the frontispiece in the first edition of Pope's translation of Homer, an engraving of the Shield of Achilles, then we hear a short radio feature about a crowd filing through a museum in Madrid, the air conditioner on the blink, everyone perspiring horribly. While the tour guide describes the piece in front of them - a bronze reconstruction of a shield from the period of the Roman Republic made to the design given in Pope's translation of Homer - in a mixture of Spanish and English, the tourists notice that they are reflected in the polished nickel plating, drops of sweat and all. An old Scottish woman sees herself as a young bride, a retired used-car dealer from Normal, Illinois sees himself as his own son, and so forth. They begin to cry, one by one. The guide looks at them and shakes his head. This always happens. You switch off the mantel radio and glance out the window at the drift of brown smog that hangs over Sydney Harbour and casts a dirty veil over the Opera House, where you have an appointment at eight.

Dark falls early. Grim
brokers hurry home to the
close of the tax year.

published in Verse magazine, 1998

© All Copyright, John Tranter.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.