sixth snowfall
in the smoke-filled kitchenette
an empty bin
(Vyacheslav Kanin)

What is this verse about? Why the sixth and not the third or the ninth? Six snowfalls in the row, but the bin is still empty, and someone is sitting there and smoking on the empty stomach – is it because there is nothing to eat? This verse reminded me of two haiku by the old masters:

Coals covered by ashes.
And my house is safely wrapped
in snow
(Buson)

Cooking potatoes.
In the silent vast of the universe
A crying child
(Hekigodo)

These three poems share similar architectonics of images – three layers of the world: the subject in the immediate proximity (coals – potatoes – bin), the setting (house – village outskirts – kitchenette) and the background (snow-covered world – universe – snowfall, also universal). It is clear what all these poems are about. The smell of boiling potatoes is the simplest, the homiest smell, and one wants to share the warmth of the thick steam above the saucepan with each and every child in the universe. In addition to the same zoom-out effect we also see the juxtaposition of snow and ashes in the haiku by Buson. The Buson’s image is very homey too: the coals die out and we feel safe and content. Cosy and infinite.

The haiku by Vyacheslav is not cosy at all. In this verse there is no hoped-for harmony between the micro- and the macro-worlds, but an apparent, though subdued, anxiety. A random (for me as a reader) number six does not seem to be sudden statement of a half-sleeping mind, but is like an hour marker on the dial of the world clock struck with the natural phenomenon – the snowfall. It seems to me that the word „sixth“ removes the contrast between the cosiness and discomfort and underlines the author’s concentration on the outside world, not on his own emotions.

I no not see anything in Vyacheslav’s haiku on top of what I’ve just described, but it allows me to feel how an ordinary human life fits not only the equal-sized objects (a kitchenette, a bin), but also the entire nature.

The editors of ULITKA heavily debated this haiku, and I think, there is a reason for that. This verse is definitely open to many interpretations and can bring back different memories. What is it about – about a tragedy, about emptiness or maybe loneliness?

In my mind this haiku evokes the memory of a different, but also smoke-filled and empty, kitchen of my formidable and difficult friend Cristap Capars, a young writer from Riga (Latvia)… and of his inapprehensible, raving deals with life and death, his total non-conformism… and of heaps of books he had read with most unusual comments on the margins, the books I could not take with me and which his half-mad brother threw away the next day after his death.

= Translated by the ULITKA =