Dear Arthur,

You asked: The ' he' is me  as you guessed. Should I revert??

An apparently simple question, but one that goes right back to my impression
of the difference in Eastern and Western verse, as seen in the nature of
haiku.
Basically it seems to me that the heart of the haiku is the freshness, the
spontaneity -it is the opposite of the over-written 'literary'style. When
Westerners start writing haiku, it seems to me they often take certain
elements of haiku, the 'prettiness' and ignore the steel sparseness and
discipline that inform the genre. It brings to mind what the Victorians did
to fairies, ignoring the dark side of these nature-spirits and transforming
them into tweeness.
What we have here, I feel is not prose interspersed with haiku, but a
prose-poem interspersed with haiku. The two forms do not merge well for me.
The standard style for a prose-poem seems to be a rather florid style which
seems completely at odds with the haiku.When I have read halibans written by
authors I'd consider experts in the oriental forms, the prose is prose, and
so the change between prose and poem works in a more direct way.
Your use of the 3rd-person seems to me to highlight the step back from the
spontaneity of the oriental form.
This is,of course, just my take on it, but for me the haiku elements do not
work because they are swamped by the richness of the surrounding
poemy-prose.
Kind regards,
  grasshopper


Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2003 4:21 PM
Subject: [THE-WORKS] The speleologist


The speleologist.

Once well inside, down that first drop on twisting rope, spun like a spider
over a welter of spray that twinkled down and away from him into the
darkness below, when  the entrance and the day are long lost, his light
flickers and fails; the mask of darkness tightens over his face.

boots chime on rock
purity of  absolute
echoes peal and crowd

His senses reach out into the cave; hears the stream in the blackness, the
beast-lick of waters lap and twist past; cold, hard aching cold, shaping the
cave around him. Here it is tomb-dark, his hand before his face and wide
blind eyes, feels the unseen rock, ancient life locked there, once teemed in
lost oceans and turned to light, changed now and hard.

water through dark ways
melts and relays, renews
ripples of pale silk

The huge mass of the fells pins him, treads him underfoot, as he slithers
like a lizard through the thin mud; tastes the grit and ooze of earth on his
lips; crunches coarse sand in his teeth. A pitch that will not go, a way
that pinches off, narrows in womb-tight, holds him in its clenched fist.

a stone rose blooms
under his searching fingers
blood on his  knuckles

The cold, the wet and the hardness press. He lies still and knows the suck
and pulse of the cave’s dark heart. Time and water transpose, unravel and
fold newness in.
He listens to the bowels of the earth draining and replenishing, turns from
the depths towards the light and the air somewhere above moving over green
dales, fresh and bright with spring flowers under a wide sky.

the day closes slowly
in moist greyness and warm winds
an owl unfolds