Terebess Asia Online (TAO)
Index
Home

Haiku by Cid Corman (1924-2004)

6 P O E M S
OYSTER BOY REVIEW 8
Poetry Annual 1998
http://www.oysterboyreview.com/archived/08/corman.html

1/
I love you

only means
I love life

and life is

life to me
only if

you are with.

2/

How can I resist
life? It glories even as
it aches within me.

3/

If these words
dont remember you—
forget them.

4/

Do you realize
how little time you have left
to realize this?

5/

And so once more we
find ourselves upon the bridge
getting us nowhere.

6/

The leaf at last gets
the drift of wind and so
settles for the ground.

...

Azaleas gone and
hydrangea trying to make
a show of it yet.

Everything
helps decipher
what nothing means.

HELLO!
How do you do? How
do you? How-do-you-do-you?
You're asking too much.

How to learn to be
ignorant? Any scholar
provides an example.

I wear the mask of
myself and very nearly
get away with it.

In the shadow of
the mountain the shadow of
any bird is lost.

Only a bunch of
swallows over and over
the darkening stream.

There is no end and
never was a beginning - so
here we are - amidst.

We are going to -
there is no future in it -
is is the presence tence.

You are here - just as
I had imagined -
imagining me.

Your shadow
on the page
the poem.

Rain-drops. Each
makes a point
of silence.

...

Mountain
stars

eyes
in the

open
do

...

What's heaped too
high
spills

Emptiness
just
fills.

...

thirty-one poems
http://www.aprweb.org/issues/july00/corman.html