By ROBERT HIRSCHFIELD
It’s indecent to stalk the dead poet. I know that. Bill Kenney, 89 when he died, was the spring breeze in winter. Dying of cancer, he joked dryly, waxed humbly in his haiku about the smallness of our earthly moments, which made him seem impossibly large standing all alone out there on the cliff edge.
family album
the stories we tell
the camera
From Kenney’s posthumous collection, Tap Dancing in My Socks (Red Moon Press/2022), that poem can serve as a field guide for much of his work. His four volumes, all from Red Moon, are dotted with anti-stories about ourselves, in which our array of posturings are sanded down.
happy hour
we don’t mention
the cancer
I came late to Kenney, just as Kenney came late to haiku. He began writing haiku at age 72 (I started at 82.) We were octogenarians together wandering around New York at the same time. Had our paths ever crossed?
In his absence, they seem to cross every day, everywhere, especially when I am alone in the late hours of the night.
old photo
the stranger
I’ve become
Those moments in old age of feeling suddenly stranded. Feet not quite on the ground, but not yet under it.
There is a video of him reading from his first collection, The Earth Pushes Back (2016) in Santa Fe. Hairless, more or less, jaw slanted a bit, he read with a disarming simplicity.
“I have this problem,” he began, “you have it too: How do you begin to write a poem when so many poems have already been written? How do you begin to write a haiku when so many haiku have already been written?”
Inclusive, playfully conspiratorial, he had the audience immediately in his pocket. The wise vulnerable father everyone wishes they had. He explained at one point how the haiku he was about to read got written. A “butterfly” haiku. The winged warhorse of the genre.
“At first I wrote, butterfly/ how long/ will I remember you. A delightful moment with the butterfly. How long will it last? But looking at it on the page, I wasn’t satisfied. The butterfly just seemed to be lying there somehow. Then I thought what I really wanted to ask is butterfly/ how long will you/ remember me.”
The poet’s concern with mortality is culled gently from the unlikely subject of the butterfly. Seen from this unexpected angle, we get a deeply unsettling betrayal of our normal butterfly expectation of well-being. We get transformative insight.
“There was a tinge of mortality to whatever he touched,” Red Moon publisher Jim Kacian, remembers. “As though he knew his time in haiku wouldn’t be long.”
rainy autumn…
the last time we did it
a second time
An inadvertent “Ah” arises within me. I have arrived, with Kenney, at a mutual crossing point. Geriatric dating, where emptiness goes to fill itself with what has gone. Man’s last chance to play romantic roulette.
What, I wonder, would Master Basho make of the geriatric dating haiku? Open to all sorts of strange experiences himself, he may well have been amused or bemused.
But his more parochial successors, wedded to the standard haiku nature poem, would no doubt have been scandalized.
Having been where Kenney went, I know of the caution its risk management (lover at 80/ quietly/ wanna lie down?) requires. Kenney had the talent to turn amorous dross into haiku gold.
safe sex
saying nothing
I’ll regret
Or this:
singles bar
she tells him she always
picks losers
His trade-off—the aliveness of eros contending against the blows of rejection on the lip of the grave.
The yawning space at the right-hand margin allows the reader a long pause to take it all in, to be the participant in what has been said or left unsaid, to relate and project his or her own story. My projection was trying to imagine myself as Kenney, old and dying, but able to remain engaged and kind to the end. How to remain open while everything around you is closing down.
prognosis terminal
his favorite ice cream
melts in the cup
The courage to shake off all illusions, to display quietly the little that remains in the poet’s punctured bag.
In the background always, his gentle ironic hum.
wind advisory
I cut one more word
from a haiku
With a little luck, it will land in my pocket. The man knew what he was looking at. He could winnow the genuine from the fake without making a big fuss about either.
soft rain
the way the oncologist
says, “we.”
Bill Kenney, poet laureate of mortality.
Robert Hirschfield is a New York-based writer and poet. He has spent much of the last five years writing and assembling poems about his mother’s Alzheimer’s. In 2019, Presa Press published a volume of his poems titled, The Road to Canaan. His work has appeared in Parabola, Tricycle, Spirituality & Health, Sojourners, The Moth (Ireland), Tears in The Fence (UK), and other publications.
Read more by Robert Hirschfield:
Remembering Is What We Bring: An Old Man Recalls An Old Friend
An Old Man, A Long-Forgotten Pitcher, An Obsession Remembered