Kikaku leads the way

Posted by Alex Stein*

Image by senunez

Sometimes people ask me how I came to be a writer of aphorisms. To that, I reply:

I came to the aphorism by way of haiku and I came to haiku by ways still vague to me. I was 25, living in Seattle, and in thrall to the prose of Jack Kerouac. I spent my days and evenings filling notebook after notebook with stream of consciousness twaddle. Perhaps, I would have continued at this until I was good and dead. There was really no reason not to. I enjoyed the activity. Notebooks were cheap. The hours flew by.

Then something odd: in the middle of the twaddle, I wrote a little poem. 

Dandelion, roar!
Simple thing,
speak your simple mind.

I looked at the poem, and here is the curious thing: the poem looked back at me. Not long after that I wrote:

Hold light,
butterfly;
for a short life:
Praise
!

The more I looked at these poems, the more they looked back at me. “What?” I asked. “What do you want?” “Divine us,” they replied. “How?” I asked. “Divine us,” they repeated.

In a bookstore in downtown Seattle, I found a haiku anthology. In it, I read Kikaku’s:

Above the boat,
bellies
of wild geese.

Over the next few years, I must have read that poem a thousand times. Then, one day, I wrote in the margin:

Perhaps our world is the spirit world of some other world. Perhaps our birdsongs are heard but faintly in some other world, and only by certain ears. Perhaps a poem is like an airlock that carries the breath of one world into the lungs of the next.

I read Kikaku’s:

  Evening bridge,
  a thousand hands
  cool on the rail.

 I wrote:

Kikaku’s bridge spans both the construct of space and the abstract of time; so, all those hands, “cool on the rail,” are also the hands of the dead in their various phases of crossing-over.

 Kikaku! That was the unlikely name of the piper who led me on.”

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*Alex Stein is (with James Lough) the co-editor of, and a contributor to, Short Flights: Thirty-two Modern Writers Share Aphorisms of Insight, Inspiration and Wit, the first EVER anthology of contemporary writers of aphorism. Other aphorists in Short Flights include Charles Simic, Stephen Dobyns, Irena Karafilly, and Yahia Lababidi.