Keith Polette
Painting the Roof with Basho
after Billy Collins
winter's end. . . a new crack in the turtle shell
Even though he worked his way through his wanderings on the narrow road north, you wouldn’t expect to see him here, rolling paint onto the flat roof of a house in the desert. Writing about landing on a tree limb at dusk, staggering out of a peony, or disappearing into the splash of a frog was his way. Even this locale seems wrong for him, for in his writings, he did not mention traveling through a land parched and burnt by sun.
desert morning attached to nothing mockingbird song
But here we are, making our way across the roof, one paint-filled roller at a time. We work in silence, our rollers keeping time with our breaths, sweat starting to drip down our faces. With every roll, the world whitens beneath us, as cracks and sun-sores disappear from the roof under the spread of paint. After a while, I stop for a moment and say, “Ya know, I think there must be a haiku in here somewhere,” but Basho, with head down, keeps painting. He has dedicated himself to this roof work, as if the most important thing in this moment were to create a wide blank page ready to be written on by rain or bird or sky.
desert sands the way the footprint makes the coyote
We work all day, side by side, me with my many-monkeyed thoughts, he inside his smile of silence, until the sun starts to set. As I am tapping down the lid on the empty bucket of paint, he asks, “After we finish, can we look through your telescope?” “Of course,” I say. We descend the ladder and clean the rollers with the water from the outdoor faucet, taking time to squeeze the paint from the wool fibers, our hands covered in what looks like swift snowmelt. Once I have set up the telescope and have brought the moon into focus, Basho peers through the eyepiece. After a moment, he lifts a finger and says, “Ah, I see Issa waving.”
star-shot sky so many knots in a net
About the Author
Keith Polette lives in El Paso, Texas. He is the author of a book of haiku, The New World, and a book of haibun, Pilgrimage, both published by Red Moon Press.