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.
