Prairie Zen: Building a Book of Haiku from the Northern Illinois Landscape

A prairie can look empty if you move through it too quickly. At walking speed, it becomes crowded.

Grass moves differently from one patch of ground to another. Birds announce territories invisible to human eyes. Weather can be seen approaching long before it arrives. A pond changes after thunder. A heron seems to construct itself from the same gray air surrounding it. The ordinary business of plants, animals, water and weather becomes almost inexhaustible once someone decides to stand still and pay attention.

That act of attention is at the center of Prairie Zen, a developing collection of haiku by Rockford poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg. Planned for publication in 2027 by Wolf Twin Books, the book grows from years of observing the landscapes of northern Illinois and the greater Midwest, including the prairies, wetlands, woods, creeks, roadsides and restored natural areas surrounding Rockford. The project is particularly connected to the kind of landscape preserved at Severson Dells Nature Center, where the supposedly quiet world of prairie and woodland turns out to be anything but quiet.

One of the central ideas behind Prairie Zen is that haiku doesn't require an exotic landscape. The astonishing thing can happen almost anywhere. A summer storm, a pond, a blackberry or an abandoned glove can be sufficient material if the poet notices the moment when an ordinary thing becomes briefly unfamiliar.

summer storm
the roofer runs
across the sky

after thunder
the pond returns
one frog at a time

Those poems establish something important about the developing collection. Nature in Prairie Zen isn't presented as a pristine realm separated from human life. Roofers, farmers, roads, towns and abandoned objects occupy the same world as frogs, birds, weather and fields. The Midwest of the book is inhabited and worked upon, sometimes damaged and sometimes reclaimed. Prairie Zen Greatest Hits

That mixture produces some of the collection's most characteristic images. Human structures don't necessarily disappear when people abandon them. Instead, other forms of life begin using them differently.

the empty silo—
a spiral staircase
made of sparrows

abandoned platform—
the arriving train
rewilds

The first poem transforms an agricultural structure without denying what it once was; the second compresses an entire ecological reversal into the unexpected verb “rewilds.” In both, the human world remains present, but it has lost its exclusive claim on the landscape. Prairie Zen Greatest Hits Prairie Zen Greatest Hits

This is not, however, a collection interested only in environmental recovery or pastoral beauty. The natural world in these poems can be comic, indifferent, violent, mysterious and occasionally unsettling. A robin's egg can be destroyed by the same weather that makes a prairie beautiful. Darkness itself can appear alive.

hailstorm—
the robin’s egg
opens the wrong way

eel river—
darkness
learning to swim

That is one reason “Zen” in the title shouldn't be mistaken for uncomplicated serenity. The poems repeatedly ask the reader to accept what is actually present rather than demand that nature become comforting. Birth, death, predation, decay, weather and renewal occupy the same landscape. Prairie Zen Greatest Hits

The prairie also offers something especially useful to haiku: enormous scale and tiny scale existing simultaneously. A person can stand beneath a sky that seems to cover half a continent while noticing one bird, one insect or one movement in the grass. Vaultonburg repeatedly moves between those dimensions.

across the prairie—
rain arriving
on horseback

fog drift—
a spider tests the air
with one leg

The first poem makes distant weather enormous and almost mythological. The second reduces the field of attention to a single leg extended into moving air. Both begin with observation, but neither stops at literal description. The image is allowed to make the imaginative leap. Prairie Zen Greatest Hits Prairie Zen Greatest Hits

Again and again, animals become the means through which the landscape briefly rearranges itself. A heron isn't merely standing in fog; it seems to be made from it. A horse barely moves, yet that movement changes the perceived silence around it.

marsh fog—
a heron
assembled from gray

night pasture—
a horse shifting weight
thins the silence

These are small moments, but smallness is not the same thing as insignificance. Haiku depends upon the possibility that concentrated attention can temporarily alter scale. Three lines can contain a pasture. One bird can reorganize the morning. Prairie Zen Greatest Hits

There is humor here as well, and that may be essential to the project's idea of Midwestern Zen. Enlightenment, if it occurs at all, doesn't always arrive beneath a perfectly flowering tree.

evening pasture—
a cow’s slow gaze
untangles my hurry

prairie wind—
my hat
becomes a pilgrim

The first poem gently reverses the usual relationship between human observer and animal. The cow isn't hurried; the poet is. In the second, the prairie offers its lesson by simply stealing his hat. Prairie Zen Greatest Hits

Prairie Zen is still being assembled, which means its final shape remains open. But the poems already suggest what kind of book it wants to become: not simply a collection of nature haiku, and not a guidebook to northern Illinois, but a record of what sustained attention can reveal about a familiar landscape.

Perhaps the philosophy of the project can be reduced to one of its smallest poems:

empty basket—
carrying home
the birdsong

Nothing has been collected. Nothing has been removed from the landscape. Yet the observer does not return empty-handed. Prairie Zen Greatest Hits

That may be the bargain at the center of both haiku and walking through a prairie. Pay attention long enough, and eventually you bring something home.

Prairie Zen by Thomas L. Vaultonburg is currently in development for publication in 2027.

 

SECOND NATURE: Salvaged-Metal Sculpture Meets Haiku in Rockford

For Rockford's Fall ArtScene, three local artists brought together two art forms that don't ordinarily share the same room: salvaged-metal sculpture and haiku. SECOND NATURE, presented at Rockford Art Deli, was a collaboration between metal sculptor Michael Zant and poets Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré. The exhibition paired Zant's handmade animal sculptures with original haiku written in response to the individual pieces, creating a show in which metal and language continually changed the way viewers looked at one another.

The premise was deliberately simple. Zant creates animals and other forms from discarded and repurposed metal. Vaultonburg and Tré each wrote haiku responding to those creatures, with the resulting poems displayed alongside the sculptures. Neither poet was attempting to explain Zant's work. Instead, the poems offered additional ways into it—sometimes playful, sometimes contemplative, sometimes concerned with the actual animal represented in the sculpture and sometimes inspired by the strange second life of the materials themselves. The exhibition also benefited Wild Roots, connecting artwork about wildlife with an organization devoted to helping actual wild animals.

Michael Zant's salvaged-metal sculpture taking shape in the workshop before SECOND NATURE.

Zant's sculptures begin far away from the finished environment of a gallery. Steel scraps, rebar, chain, old tools and pieces of machinery acquire unexpected second lives in his workshop. What was manufactured for one purpose becomes a foot, wing, shell, tail, beak or body. The transformation made haiku an unusually natural companion to the work. Haiku asks a writer to pay close enough attention to an ordinary thing that it becomes strange again. Zant accomplishes something similar physically. An object so familiar that we barely notice it anymore is cut, welded and rearranged until suddenly there is an animal standing in front of us.

Importantly, the original material never entirely disappears. A chain remains recognizably a chain even when it has become an animal's tail. A fork can still be a fork while simultaneously functioning as part of a creature. Rebar retains its industrial identity while becoming bone, leg or spine. That tension between what something was and what it has become is central to the work. The viewer's eye moves back and forth between the illusion and its construction: animal, scrap metal, animal again.

Three of Michael Zant's creatures—frog, turtle and salamander—before their installation at Rockford Art Deli.

Seen together on Zant's worktable, the sculptures reveal something that can become less obvious once artwork reaches a gallery: these objects were unmistakably made by hand. Welds remain visible. Steel retains scratches, discoloration and evidence of previous use. Familiar manufactured objects peek through the anatomy. Rather than concealing those histories, the sculptures make them part of the animals' personalities. A turtle assembled from metal remains unmistakably a turtle, but look again and the illusion breaks apart into individual remnants of human industry. Look once more and the turtle returns.

For SECOND NATURE, Vaultonburg and Tré generally approached each sculpture independently. Rather than collaborating on a single poem that told the viewer what the sculpture meant, each poet was free to discover something different in the same creature. Their haiku were printed on small individual tiles and displayed with the artwork. A visitor could therefore encounter Zant's sculpture, then one poet's response, then the other's, creating a small three-way conversation among object, language and observer. The poems weren't labels. They were additional acts of attention.

The collaboration also produced Wild Cogs, a small haiku chapbook by Vaultonburg and Tré created for the exhibition. Its title captures much of the central idea and humor of SECOND NATURE. The mechanical and natural worlds aren't necessarily opposites here. A manufactured object can become part of an imagined ecosystem. Something discarded can acquire another identity. The cog becomes the creature, and the boundary between human debris and animal form becomes unexpectedly porous.

There was another dimension to making wildlife the center of the exhibition. Proceeds from SECOND NATURE benefited Wild Roots, giving the project's transformations a practical connection to the living world outside the gallery. Representations of animals assembled from discarded human materials could, in a small way, help people caring for actual wildlife. That gave the exhibition's title another meaning. Second nature usually describes something practiced until it becomes instinctive, but here it could be read almost literally: nature made a second time.

A piece of metal is manufactured, used and eventually discarded. Someone picks it up. Michael Zant sees an animal in it. Thomas L. Vaultonburg and Tré look at that animal and find poems. Eventually the whole strange chain of transformations arrives in a gallery in downtown Rockford, where someone else looks at it and sees something none of the three artists anticipated. For an exhibition constructed largely from objects that had already lived one useful life, that seems exactly right.

SECOND NATURE was presented at Rockford Art Deli, 402 E. State Street in downtown Rockford, as part of Fall ArtScene 2026.

 

Hike You!: Six Years of Haiku and Photographs from Rockford

For six years, Rockford poet Thomas L. Vaultonburg walked the streets, alleys, riverbanks, neighborhoods, industrial corridors, and forgotten spaces of his hometown with a camera and a notebook. The result became Hike You!: Six Years of Photographs and Haiku from the Heart of Rockford, an exhibition presented at RevHaus during Rockford’s Fall ArtScene.

The project began simply enough: walk through Rockford and pay attention.

Over time, those walks produced an unusual record of the city. Rather than concentrating on familiar landmarks or picturesque views, Hike You! often turns toward the things people ordinarily pass without noticing: an abandoned office chair, a bicycle pulled from the river, the remains of an estate sale, municipal infrastructure, discarded objects, vacant spaces, weeds, weather, and the evidence people leave behind.

Vaultonburg paired photographs from these walks with haiku and short poems. The combination creates something between documentary photography, poetry, and a personal geography of Rockford.

The exhibition included 24 finished pieces drawn from approximately six years of walking and observation. Among them were works titled “Office Chair on Broadway,” “Bicycle From the River,” “After the Estate Sale,” “Municipal,” “The New Owners,” “The Freezer,” and “Archaeology.”

The subjects aren't necessarily extraordinary. That is part of the point.

Haiku traditionally depends upon attention: noticing a moment closely enough that something apparently ordinary opens into something larger. Hike You! applies that principle to a Midwestern city. Rockford isn't treated as scenery behind the poems. The city supplies the poems.

A Different Kind of Nature Walk

Vaultonburg's recent haiku has increasingly concerned itself with the natural world of northern Illinois—prairies, rivers, birds, insects, trees, weather, and the landscapes surrounding Rockford. Hike You! approaches nature from another direction.

Here, nature and the human world are constantly colliding.

Plants reclaim neglected property. Weather works on abandoned objects. Animals occupy spaces people have left behind. A discarded object becomes part of a landscape. Something ugly becomes funny, mysterious, or unexpectedly beautiful when encountered at walking speed.

That attention to the overlooked has long been central to Vaultonburg's poetry. In Hike You!, however, the physical city becomes part of the composition.

Walking matters, too.

A city experienced through a windshield is different from a city experienced on foot. Six years of repeatedly walking the same general territory allows tiny changes to become visible: something disappears, something grows back, a building changes hands, an object appears beside the road and is gone the following week.

Taken together, the photographs become an accidental historical record of Rockford.

Poetry Made in Rockford

The exhibition also belongs to a larger period of activity for Vaultonburg and artist and poet Tré, whose collaborative work has increasingly combined poetry, visual art, nature, and public space.

During the same Fall ArtScene weekend, their haiku appeared in SECOND NATURE at Rockford Art Deli, where poems were paired with salvaged-metal sculptures by Michael Zant. Their work also appeared as part of a public installation at the Rockford Public Library.

But Hike You! is perhaps the most specifically Rockford-centered of these projects.

There is no imaginary landscape behind it.

The streets are Rockford streets. The river is the Rock River. The alleys, houses, weeds, discarded furniture, industrial remnants, birds, sidewalks, and changing neighborhoods belong to the place where the poems were written.

That specificity is important because regional art doesn't have to make its subject grander than it is. Sometimes the more intensely local the observation becomes, the more recognizable the experience becomes to everyone else.

Six Years of Looking

The final exhibition at RevHaus condensed thousands of walks and observations into 24 pieces.

Filmmaker Ryan Davis also documented the project, adding another layer to an undertaking that had begun privately and incrementally: one person walking around his hometown and noticing things.

That may ultimately be the simplest description of Hike You!.

It is six years of looking.

And it makes an argument—quietly, repeatedly—that a person doesn't necessarily have to travel somewhere exotic to find material worthy of poetry. There is enough strangeness, beauty, humor, loss, nature, history, and accidental composition within walking distance.

You just have to keep walking long enough to see it.

Vanished Roads By Thomas L. Vaultonburg: A Haiku Journey Through Grief and Back Into the World

 Book Review of Vanished Roads  A Haiku Journey Through Grief and Back Into the World

by Millard Rausch, University of Pennsylvania

Vanished Roads is less a collection of individual haiku than a journey told in small moments. Thomas L. Vaultonburg begins in grief and isolation and gradually moves outward, into forests, mountains, rivers, animals, weather, and finally a renewed sense of belonging in the world.

Wolf Twin Books

The poems are spare, but many contain an unexpected turn that changes the image completely. A bare tree is still capable of holding the sky. A power outage gives the stars their old jobs back. A bucket drawn from a mountain well comes up full of stars. Elsewhere, coyotes deliver sermons, hats become pilgrims, and a mountain path worth following is precisely the one that goes nowhere.

What impressed me most is the architecture of the book. Images and ideas recur and transform as the poems progress. Doors, roads, wounds, reflections, footsteps and names gradually give way to a speaker becoming less separate from the landscape around him. By the final poems, the distinction between traveler and wilderness has nearly disappeared.

Tré's black-and-white illustrations are used sparingly and beautifully, giving certain poems room to expand visually without overwhelming their simplicity.

There is grief here, but Vanished Roads isn't ultimately a book about remaining inside grief. It's about what happens afterward: walking long enough to discover that the world is still strange, funny, beautiful, and capable of receiving you.

A thoughtful collection for readers of contemporary haiku, nature poetry, and short contemplative writing.

-Dr. Millard Rausch

 

Tea With the Tigress: Ten Years Inside the Strange Machinery of a Life

Tea With the Tigress: Ten Years Inside the Strange Machinery of a Life

I don't think Tea With the Tigress is primarily a book of love poems, although love is everywhere in it.

I don't think it's primarily a book about sex, although there is plenty of that too.

And despite the number of poems involving death, loneliness, aging, memory, physical vulnerability, poetry, absurdity, wolves, celestial bodies, Richard Brautigan, used clothing, zombies, alcohol, buses and people behaving badly, it isn't really a book about any of those things either.

I think Tea With the Tigress is a book about being returned to the world.

That is much easier for me to see now than it was when the book appeared in 2023.

The subtitle is Poems 2010–2020, which makes the collection something of an accidental autobiography. The poems weren't written to document a decade. They accumulated while a decade was happening. When gathered together, however, they preserve something a deliberately written memoir probably couldn't: the strange proportions by which a life is actually experienced.

Huge things sometimes occupy three lines.

A ridiculous thing can occupy a page.

Sex becomes astrophysics. A trip becomes a joke. A flower becomes an existential event. The human heart becomes machinery. An answering machine becomes an excuse to make jokes about dead composers.

And somehow all of it belongs together.

The opening poem, "Tigress," contains the proposition upon which much of the book operates:

when a wise man meets
Tigress in the jungle, he
says, thank you, my love

It is funny, but it isn't merely funny. The tiger isn't defeated. The tiger isn't domesticated. The supposedly wise man recognizes what has arrived and gives thanks for it.

That's a pretty good introduction to the next eighty pages.

The World Comes Back

Reading the old Zombie Logic Blog alongside these poems makes the decade feel much less abstract.

There I am watching horror movies at ridiculous hours. Collecting Monster Club artifacts. Playing old computer RPGs. Writing about Hot Wheels, Queen albums, Hamm's beer signs, pennies, fantasy football, poetry feuds, Richard Brautigan, bad jokes and things I found on my hard drive. I invent Dr. Millard Rausch's post-zombie-apocalypse biography. I create imaginary Outsider Poetry organizations. I remember motel rooms. I make jokes about Presidential Physical Fitness Awards.

And I keep writing poems.

It would be easy to dismiss all of that as clutter. I don't anymore.

It's the material of the life.

One of the smallest poems in Tea With the Tigress is "Avocation":

since you never
had time
to behold
this particular
downspout
I went ahead
and did it
for you.

That little poem may explain a surprisingly large portion of my work.

Someone has to look at the downspout.

Someone has to remember the forgotten movie, the weird sign, the motel, the bus station, the ridiculous conversation, the object nobody else thought worth saving. Someone has to look at all the supposedly insignificant things while everyone else is busy looking at the significant ones.

That was what Zombie Logic Blog was doing during these years, too.

And apparently so was I.

Jenny Enters the Poems

But there is another enormous presence in Tea With the Tigress: Jenny.

Not simply Jenny as subject, but Jenny as an alternative way of encountering the world.

One of my favorite examples now is "May." The speaker is in his laboratory "pissing away April" while she is in her studio preparing the colors of the coming month. He wants to interrupt her but fears that doing so will cause "Garbageman Green / Peonies" and "Poopsicle Lilies" to erupt from him.

Having recently revisited the old Zombie Logic posts, that poem suddenly looks almost documentary.

Again and again in those entries, I wander into a room and Jenny has made something.

Sometimes I understand it.

Sometimes I don't.

Sometimes it takes me four paintings to figure out what she's doing.

The domestic world of these poems isn't presented as retreat from the larger world. It is where the larger world keeps appearing. Tea, paintings, dresses, desks, flowers, food, bodies and jokes continually open trapdoors into something enormous.

"Waiting" may be the clearest early statement of it. Love is compared first to an apple harvested too early, then startlingly to a heart awaiting a surgeon's scalpel, and finally to tea being prepared for afternoons of conversation at a shared desk. The poem ends with two people occupying the same room separately, waiting for their love "to steep."

That double desk may be one of the most important locations in the book.

Not Paris.

Not Greenwich Village.

Not some mythical poet's garret.

A double desk.

Two people making things.

The Body Becomes Strange

The body in Tea With the Tigress is never entirely dependable.

Sometimes it is erotic. Sometimes comic. Sometimes cosmic. Sometimes it is essentially a machine whose warranty has become questionable.

In "What Makes Me Tick," the speaker's mechanical aortic valve becomes something simultaneously industrial and alive:

My St. Jude 27 vavgj-515
Mechanical aortic valve
Thuds like a war bird's wings
In a hummingbird feeder.

That's one of the central transformations of the collection.

The machinery doesn't destroy the poetry.

It becomes poetry.

Later, in "Changing Lanes On an Empty Highway At 3:22 A.M.," the speaker takes inventory of medications, operations, age and diminishing speed, then cautiously moves into the passing lane anyway. He knows something "younger, faster, / More capable" will eventually overtake him.

But for a moment he accelerates.

That strikes me now as one of the key poems in the collection.

There is no grand declaration of triumph.

The car changes lanes.

That's enough.

And Then There Is Sex

There is a lot of sex in this book.

Some of it is tender. Some is ridiculous. Some becomes astronomy, geography, classical music, wine criticism or military history because apparently simply describing sex would have been too straightforward.

"The Yellow River" turns a drunken navigational error in bed into a disastrous military incursion and concludes, perfectly, "War is hell."

"Sunday" sets up an elaborate sexual encounter before revealing in its final joke that the activity under discussion is apparently doing the taxes.

"Astrophysics" calculates a kiss along the Y axis of a shoulder as though intimacy were celestial navigation.

This is important because the erotic poems aren't really interruptions of the more serious material.

They are the same material.

The body that can break is also the body that desires.

The body that ages still reaches for another body.

The body that contains machinery still wants to dance.

Mortality doesn't negate appetite in this book. Mortality makes appetite urgent.

The Poet as Fool

There is also an argument about poetry running through Tea With the Tigress, and the poet generally loses it.

Good.

"The Old Hermit Speaks of Poetry" imagines poems escaping like ducks from a broken pen. Instead of chasing them, the old poet drinks his wine and wanders into the hills, only to discover that the poems have been waiting there all along—in rocks, trees and a brook laughing at the fool searching for them.

"Discourses In Poetics" takes the solemn master-and-acolyte tradition and slowly dismantles it until the Master is apparently attempting to access someone's bank account.

That's closer to my conception of poetry than any manifesto I could write.

Poetry matters tremendously.

Poets should therefore probably not be trusted with it.

The dedication page establishes the governing philosophy before the collection properly begins, quoting my middle-school principal Joe Parks: "Mr. Vaultonburg, you amuse only yourself."

Forty years later, that seems less like criticism than permission.

The Old World Is Still There

The book isn't entirely domestic renewal and comic eroticism.

Older ghosts keep wandering through it.

"Playing the Short Stack," which we've just encountered again while rehabilitating the Zombie Logic archive, reduces an entire losing position to a poker table where the speaker can't formulate a comeback because he can't even see his opponent behind her mountain of chips.

"Pockets" imagines wearing a dead stranger's Salvation Army suit while typing poems on a Smith Corona and occasionally checking the pockets to see whether the previous owner left instructions.

"Beaten" needs four lines:

Every face
At the bus station
Is a torn
Lottery ticket.

Those poems come from the same imaginative territory as the older Zombie Logic material we've been excavating: buses, bars, thrift stores, motel rooms, people who have lost, people who are still playing anyway.

But something has changed.

The speaker isn't quite as trapped inside that world anymore.

He can look back at it.

From Tigress to Wolves

The final portion of the collection begins to sound noticeably different.

The poems become quieter.

More elemental.

Wolves appear. Trees appear. The moon appears. Solitude stops being merely isolation and starts becoming a landscape.

"Unravel" may be the hinge:

as i unravel
I become miles of new thread
to weave with again

That poem now sounds almost prophetic.

By the time we reach "Lilacs," the heart is described as a bomb shelter emerging from an "endless / Winter of discontent." The speaker remains wary of love, but the window is open.

And then comes "Full Wolf Moon 2020":

full wolf moon bays down
on grey, oily streets howling
for its lost lover

Read from the vantage point of 2026, it is difficult not to hear the poet who would eventually write Small Songs for Weary Travelers beginning to emerge.

The attention is changing.

The jokes aren't gone. The weirdness isn't gone. The city isn't gone.

But the poems have started looking outward.

Tea With the Tigress

That's why I think the title is better than I previously understood.

The Tigress isn't simply a woman.

She isn't merely love or sexuality either.

The Tigress is life when it becomes dangerous enough to be worth approaching again.

The wise man doesn't conquer her.

He doesn't explain her.

He meets her.

And says thank you.

Across Tea With the Tigress, the speaker repeatedly does exactly that. He says thank you to love, sex, absurdity, art, jokes, bodies, mechanical parts, memories, old clothes, bad decisions, flowers, wolves, buses, darkness and another day in which something strange might still happen.

The book ends near grief, but it doesn't end in defeat. "End Punctuation" imagines two people leaning into one another like parentheses around the story of their love.

That's an extraordinarily appropriate image for the collection.

Because Tea With the Tigress is itself a set of parentheses.

2010–2020.

Ten years enclosed between them.

Inside are several lives, a tremendous amount of nonsense, some darkness, quite a bit of sex, a mechanical heart, a double desk, a woman making paintings in the next room, wolves gathering at the edges, and a poet gradually discovering that surviving the world and paying attention to it may actually be the same activity.

The copyright page credits Jenny Mathews with the cover and illustrations for "Halloween 1974" and "The Perfect Crime," while Tré created the remaining artwork and provided design and editing help. That makes the physical book itself strangely appropriate: other people helped surround these poems with images and give the decade a shape.

And perhaps that's what I see most clearly now, after going back through the old blog.

I thought I was wasting an astonishing amount of time.

Watching movies. Writing jokes. Collecting things. Looking out windows. Making blogs nobody seemed to read. Falling in love. Getting older. Writing poems about downspouts.

Turns out I was living.

And fortunately, I wrote some of it down.

Say Yes To the Sunlight When It Finds You

 

Some days offer no revelation, no grand solution, no sudden change of direction. They simply open for a moment and let a little light through.

This piece grew from one of the simplest ideas in Vanished Roads: when something good reaches you, however briefly, don't argue with it. The dandelion has no trouble understanding this.

Say yes to the sunlight when it finds you.

Say Yes To the Sunlight When It Finds You is an acrylic painting by Thomas L. Vaultonburg based on an illustration by Tré from page 96 of their 2026 book Vanished Roads from Wolf Twin Books

 

Prairie Zen: Five More Haiku from the Midwest

Prairie Zen begins with a simple proposition: the ordinary world is enough.

It doesn't require a temple, a distant mountain, or a landscape untouched by people. In the Midwest, the natural and human worlds have been tangled together for generations. Fields meet subdivisions. Birds nest in abandoned buildings. Goldenrod takes over vacant lots. Creeks run beside highways. Trees outlive fences, farms, houses, and sometimes the people who planted them.

Prairie Zen pays attention to that world without demanding that it become prettier, purer, or more profound than it already is.

This is particularly suited to a place like Rockford and northern Illinois. We live in a landscape people frequently underestimate. There are no oceans or dramatic mountain ranges demanding attention. Much of what happens here happens quietly: weather crossing a field, weeds reclaiming disturbed ground, an old orchard surviving after the road to it has disappeared.

The poems below offer five more ways of approaching Prairie Zen.

1.

pasture fence—
one walnut tree
older than the wire

Three lines contain two different understandings of time.

The fence represents the human landscape: property lines, ownership, agriculture, division. Someone decided where one piece of land ended and another began and stretched wire across it.

The walnut tree belongs to another chronology.

It was there before the boundary. If the fence eventually rusts into the grass, the tree may still be there afterward.

Prairie Zen frequently notices this difference between human time and landscape time. Our arrangements can seem permanent because they last longer than we do. The landscape has another definition of permanent.

2.

subdivision dusk—
fireflies returning
to no field at all

This is Prairie Zen after development.

The poem doesn't pretend the subdivision isn't there, nor does it turn into a lecture about what replaced the field. Instead, it watches the fireflies return.

That word—returning—carries the poem.

The insects behave according to an older map. Their presence briefly reveals another landscape underneath the one we have constructed.

This is important to Prairie Zen because nature isn't somewhere else. It persists in drainage ditches, yards, vacant lots, highway margins and subdivisions. The distinction we make between the human world and the natural world is considerably cleaner than the world itself.

3.

farm auction—
the lilacs
staying put

This one is almost brutally Midwestern.

A farm auction marks an ending. Machinery, furniture, tools and possessions accumulated across a life can be tagged, priced and carried away by strangers.

The lilacs aren't participating.

They remain beside the house.

There is sadness here, but the poem doesn't instruct us to be sad. That's another characteristic of Prairie Zen: emotion can emerge from accurately observing the world instead of being announced by the poet.

The auction disperses one human life.

The lilacs bloom where they were planted.

4.

drainage ditch—
a mallard pair
lower their standards

Prairie Zen also needs this poem because Prairie Zen cannot be allowed to become unbearably solemn.

The joke depends upon our hierarchy of landscapes. A pristine wetland is beautiful. A drainage ditch is infrastructure. Surely respectable ducks should have better accommodations.

The ducks don't care.

To the mallards, water is water.

There's something quietly useful in that. Human beings spend tremendous energy ranking places, experiences, careers, possessions and ourselves. The mallards encounter a ditch and see somewhere to land.

Sometimes enlightenment has webbed feet and questionable real-estate standards.

5.

vacant lot—
goldenrod
without witnesses

This might be one of the purest Prairie Zen poems in the larger group.

A vacant lot is defined in human language by absence. Something should supposedly be there—a house, a store, a factory, a parking lot—but isn't.

Goldenrod has a different assessment.

It flowers.

And the final line removes us from the equation altogether. The goldenrod doesn't bloom so someone can appreciate it. Beauty doesn't require an audience. The world doesn't become meaningful when a human being arrives to observe it.

Indeed, the poet's greatest accomplishment here may be noticing something that would have happened exactly the same way without him.

A Zen Native to This Place

Prairie Zen isn't an attempt to paste an imported spiritual vocabulary over the Midwest. It grows from looking closely at the place itself.

The prairie has already been plowed, fenced, paved, abandoned, replanted and developed. Rivers have been redirected. Factories have closed. Farms have become subdivisions. Vacant lots have become small accidental prairies. Yet everywhere, other lives continue negotiating with what we've made.

The walnut tree outlasts the wire. Fireflies return to the missing field. Lilacs remain after the auction. Mallards accept the drainage ditch. Goldenrod flowers without anybody watching.

There is no pristine world to return to.

There is this one.

Prairie Zen begins there.