My mother died this spring, an old lady with a halo of white hair, her classic features unfallen. A great beauty in her prime, she firmly and rather shamelessly denied imperfect reality. Today, Good Friday, I remember the eloquent silence of flowers, which she arranged with true flair, and indoor, pampered cats, with which she felt a certain kinship.
In the haiku, which I wrote the day of her death, the seasonal word is strong -- the high clouds, the spring light. The sense of distance is immense. That's the base. The fragment is: “mother's last dream.” The "lastness"—the extremity-- of this dream has to click with the image in the base; the gap between the sections must become a bridge between the universal and the particular. The click – the ahah!-- gives a particular quality to the dream -- a very pure dream, just that pearly light. That and the high transformations!
The "proportions" in the base are then: as the daylight is to the high clouds. And the analogy is: so mother's dream is to X. The "X" is the unnamable identity, the “dark enigma” behind the clouds, which the dream symbolizes; but also the consciousness capable of knowing itself as such. So the haiku witnesses the open identity of this dreamer at the edge of her life.
How high the clouds
this perfect spring day—
mother’s last dream.
