What I’d like to explore may end up somewhat at variance with some parts of Michael’s lovingly intelligent presentation of a wonderful poem, but not so much, I hope, as to tread disrespectfully upon it. Actually, I suspect that what I have to say is somewhere implicit in what he has said. Perhaps Michael will tell me.

Two images are presented in the poem, one after the other: “white cotton nightgown” and “a cloud on the bedroom floor”. While it is true that a connection will most likely be discovered, is it not also true that both images can claim their separate places in our perception, in our imagination? For me, to say the white cotton nightgown is a cloud on the bedroom floor is an instance of the imagination’s capacity to be reductive; perhaps this is a *tendency* of metaphor in general: to open the imagination but in a directed way. This is something, of course, which haiku usually avoids, which is not to say that metaphor cannot be used effectively.

At any rate, one can easily see that the overt use of metaphor in this poem would have destroyed it. What I am wondering about is the tendency we may have to grasp the implied metaphor and stop there, to hold onto what we have grasped. Part of the poem’s charm for me is the second image presented: a “cloud on the bedroom floor” which I perceive as *literal*, precisely because it is not directly linked to the first, equally (within the world of the poem) literal image: a “white cotton nightgown”. We may give one more “reality” than the other, but why?

I can’t say if this way of perceiving/reading can be generalized as the way perceptive reading works, or if it is just my preferred way of seeing things, but the poem presents *two* images (as haiku often do, and as we know, the imagination as much as nature itself loves, or at least is riddled with, the play of two). But it does not by any means tell us what to do with them. It gives us a freedom we may or may not feel comfortable with. We may be comfortable with a real nightgown, but what about a real cloud on the floor? It may be only momentarily real, but we are dealing with moments, no?

In one way then, the poem (and haiku or poetry in general) speaks to the need we often have to make sense of things, to make connections. We don’t want to feel that images are arbitrary or only fantastic. But if I can hold both parts in my imagination, they have the opportunity to talk to one another, to move in and out of each other’s sphere, to change and be changed in surprising ways, directed neither by the writer *nor* by the reader. The poem is good enough, real enough, to inspire this effort, though effort is too strong a word: closer to embrace. On the other hand, if I lump them together, I lose sight of each, and I lose sight of the whole they are continually becoming. (Similar, maybe, to how we see married couples we’ve known a long time). Which is all probably just a different way of saying what Michael has already said and another way of talking about the genius of this poem and of haiku.

So I’m grateful to him and of course to Jean LeBlanc for giving me the spark to think out loud a bit, and make a couple of discoveries for myself along the way.

I’ll end this with a poem by Yeats:

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.