I tried to make these paintings like haiku: concise, modest, and charming.

The poems that I used for the titles are by Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827). The name Issa means “a cup of tea” or “a single bubble in steeping tea.” Issa has been described as a Whitman or Neruda in miniature, probably because his poems are filled with creaturely life. He wrote hundreds of poems about flies, fleas, crickets, bedbugs, and lice.

These paintings were made in collaboration with the haiku, not as illustrations of them. I wanted to get underneath their words into the feeling that preceded them. The challenge was to stay simple, to paint as if each mark was something new.


For you fleas too
the nights must be long,
they must be lonely.
The snail gets up
and goes to bed
with very little fuss.
Crescent moon —
bent to the shape
of the cold.
Napped half the day;
no one
punished me!

Insects on a bough
floating downriver,
still singing
All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.
Under my house
an inchworm
measuring the joists.
Don’t kill that fly!
Look — it’s wringing its hands,
wringing its feet.

Even with insects —
some can sing,
some can’t.
Cricket
chirping
in a scarecrow’s belly.
In a dream
my daughter lifts a melon
to her soft cheek
That wren —
looking here, looking there.
You lose something?


The translations of the poems are found in The Essential Haiku, versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa, edited by Rober Hass, Ecco Press, 1994.
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