Finding The Sky

Finding The Sky 

- Michael Dylan Welch

There’s a story told about Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche that speaks to the idea of implication in haiku. In 1971, Rinpoche was teaching a class on Buddhism at the University of Colorado. In one lecture, as John J. Baker reports in his reminiscence, “The Dharma in a Single Drawing” (Tricycle, Spring 2015; http://www.tricycle.com/newbuddhism/teachings-and-texts/dharmasingle-drawing), Rinpoche drew a picture on the blackboard, and asked, “What is this a picture of?” Eventually someone answered by saying the obvious, “It’s a picture of a bird,” as indeed it was. But Rinpoche then said something that altered his students’ view of the obvious, akin to how we might approach haiku. He said, “It’s a picture of the sky.”

A lesson for haiku poets is that, as we write, we can fixate so intensely on what’s in front of us that we neglect what is out the corner of the eye, what might also be happening at the same time, and what might be implied—emotionally, culturally, and spatially. As readers, too, we can focus so much on the image that we miss the image’s context, again usually implied, in emotional, cultural, and spatial ways. It’s one thing to think about ma, or the silence or psychological space within the poem, usually created by