#21 - bare feet in the grass

Buried by Books; Descanso Garden Sights; Summer Haiku

Hello, my friends,

Can you believe that I’ve published this newsletter for 21 straight weeks? In a few weeks it’ll be half-a-year. Thank you for hanging out with my words every Friday, or whenever you get around to reading this. Speaking of getting around to doing something, I neglected to mention last week that the summer sumo tournament in Nagoya had begun. It’s going to be over this Sunday and if you’ve been watching you’ll know that Nishikigi is in the lead with a 10-2 record (as of Thursday evening). Though he was ranked at the very top of the rank-and-filers of the top division (M1) after the last tournament, I doubt anyone was expecting the middlish (dare I say, forgettable) rikishi (wrestler), who has been bouncing around the top two divisions for the past seven years, to be in this position. I wouldn’t feel sad if he stuck it out on the final three days and took the yūshō (championship). Sumo is full of surprises!

“Sumo Wrestling” (1984) by Ay-O

Buried by Books

Last Sunday morning, I visited two bookstores not too far from where I live, the North Figueroa Bookshop and Read Books (which has a local dog with an Instagram). When I evaluate bookstores I look at the regular stuff: Do they have lots of books? Am I interested in a lot of their books? Is the decor nice? Are the staff friendly? Is the general ambience welcoming? Each place also gets a Burial Score™. What’s that, you ask?

Well, I figure if I’m in a bookstore when a serious earthquake strikes I will probably be entombed by books. But the North Figueroa Bookshop, with it’s neatly shelved volumes, attractive displays, and ADA-compliant pathways is made for life. The books will dive off their high shelves but without murderous intentions. Chances are I’ll elude the reaper. Burial Score: 2 (not one because it isn’t very big so death is still possible). Read Books, on the other hand, is a claustrophile’s paradise — your prototypical used bookstore with its narrow aisles, books stacked floor-to-ceiling amid shelves packed two to three deep, making a fairly small space feel even smaller. Would I perish here? Absolutely and with love in my heart. Burial Score: 4.

What’s the Burial Score of your favorite bookstore?

(For the curious, I purchased one book: Life is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl by Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog)

“Crane, book, and oil lamp” (1946) by Pablo Picasso

Descanso Garden Sights

I took a short solo walk at the Descanso Gardens recently. Here is some of what I saw:

• Lots of, what looked like, coyote poop on a utility road

• Several older Korean couples enjoying the sun and shade

• A lizard that was like 13 inches long, 40% body, 60% tail

• Small, frolicking, squirrels

• And a fully-grown squirrel straight-up chillin’ on a rock (see below)

• A teenage girl engrossed in a book on a secluded bench

• A child who was upset that he couldn’t go on the recently re-opened train

• Lots of tadpoles and one turtle

• A labyrinth (I walked it)

It did not scamper when I walked by. Too blessed to be stressed!

Summer Haiku

While at the Descanso Garden, I also thought about haiku so when I came home I took Karma Tenzing Wangchuck’s chapbook Shelter | Street off my shelf and perused it. Here are some of his summer poems:

record heat --
a fly in the shade
of a rose petal


bare feet in the grass write five poems


low tide...
   the shells
      not chosen

You may be wondering about the middle poem — what’s this one-line doing among examples of a three-line form? Indeed, one-liners are not uncommon in English-language haiku. They capture the brevity of the form as it appears in Japanese while still maintaining the rhetorical qualities that defines haiku, notably two distinct parts (delineated by a specific cutting words in Japanese haiku, but not in English). You can see how in the first and third poems, there is an en-dash and ellipses after the first lines. These cut the poem in two with the shorter portion serving to set the scene. “record heat” puts us directly into mid-summer weather and provides contrast for the fly’s coolness of the second half. In the third poem, “low tide” creates the condition for the second half of the poem to exist. With masterful technique, the poet uses each word followed by each line that our eyes skim to reveal the poem’s emotional pay-off. Though there are two parts of the poem, their dependence on one another makes both essential.

Similarly, the context of the middle poem makes it obvious that “bare feet in the grass” (a summer image, to be sure) is separate from “write five poems” yet unlike the third poem’s interconnection between its halves, here the incongruity of the parts is what draws us in. One reads the poem and has questions: Five poems about the feet? Is this an order the poet gave himself? Is it for us? Is it a to-do list? Where are the feet poems? There’s a charm in sending us off on this innocent romp after meaning all while being unable to shake the feeling of grass on our bare feet.

If you’d like to read more of Karma Tenzing Wangchuk’s work, the Haiku Foundation has kindly scanned his book Stone Buddha and are making it available for free as a pdf on their website.

“Shell Beach at Shinnecock” (1892) by William Merritt Chase