2024 Touchstone Award Winner for Individual Haibun – Evan Vandermeer
The Shape of a Life
Do you remember how, when we first met, and it was my turn to stand in front of the class and give a how-to speech on a skill of my choosing, you booed me? And when we taught for a week in that remote Slovakian village, the one so small it didn’t have lodging for visitors, but so bizarre it had a zoo with a few spare beds, and goats that bleated us awake each day in time to walk two miles down the dirt road to where we taught? And when, the first time, I didn’t even see the testing strip on the counter, but brushed it off the bag of baby clothes you put together to tell me? And when we found, together, the place where language fails, shrugs and lies down? Like the zoo’s only lion, lazing at the back of its cage in the shade? For a long time we spoke of returning there, of those dark wooden ceiling beams splayed with whorls of all shapes and sizes, which we classified while lying in bed on our backs, and named, late into the night. This morning, though you aren’t quite showing, you placed my hand on your stomach and the firmness there sent an electric thrill through my whole body, so that this wild thing we’re trying, again, became a new kind of real. Now, I want to capture something of the evening light glancing off the puzzle you’re stooped over, of your searching for the edge pieces without any kind of system that will let you know when you’ve found them all, and of your laughing, softly, when I point that out, following your every move.
sanding down
an edge of the abacus
soft summer wind
—Evan Vandermeer, hedgerow Issue 145
Commentary from the Panel:
This compelling haibun opens with the nostalgic phrase “Do you remember…” and five revealing, stream-of-consciousness questions describing the narrator’s relationship with a fellow teacher. The intimate prose, set in an interior landscape, invites the reader into the text and rouses our curiosity as it recounts the couple’s story. The implied sense of place and topography also piques our imagination, as the piece effectively moves back and forth in time, interweaving the past, present and the implications of an imagined future.
At a pivotal turn in the story, she tries to tell him she’s pregnant by leaving out a testing strip and a bag of baby clothes, but he doesn’t see them. The couple’s almost painful difficulty communicating about this life shaping-event is described in intensely poetic and intimate terms with “And when we found together, the place where language fails, shrugs and lies down?” A metaphorical allusion follows, likening their attempts to a lion “lazing at the back of its cage.” This introduces a deepening sense of mystery, as it hints at inner turmoil or perhaps repressed aggression hidden in the shadows, a possible result of the upcoming radical change in their presumably young and carefree lives.
Like a dense Slovakian mlhy fog settling in and looming over the land, the narration reveals their pattern, with what’s not said morphing into greater importance than what is. It conjures up midnight encounters in their Slovakian lodging, where instead of talking about the momentous decisions they face, they lie on their backs late into the night classifying whorls in the wooden ceiling beams of their rustic room. Once again time shape-shifts, as the narrator states “This morning…you placed my hand on your stomach.” We too feel the “electric thrill” of “this wild thing” the couple is trying to accept and understand. The shape of her belly, not yet revealing the new life hidden within her, but signifying an upending of all they have known.
The poet then effectively slows down the emotion-laden pace by dropping us right into the scene, referencing the light and the visual poetry of her working a puzzle. Another metaphor, an allusion to how this couple, in their own unique way, will make sense of the forthcoming changes without any edge pieces to point the way. And how impossible it must feel to contain or predict it.
The poem satisfactorily ends by his touching reference to her “laughing, softly” and how he follows “her every move.” An almost reverent revelation which encompasses, like a set of Matryoshka stacked dolls, both her tactile work on the puzzle and how she and the growing baby, spatially and emotionally, welcome him into their union.
The richness of this piece is enhanced by the workings of its three primary elements— the title, the prose (with its sense of ma and multiple references to shapes and sizes) and the haiku—a unity of parts which deepens with each re-reading. The haibun concludes with a spell-conjuring three-line haiku that captures the essence of yugen, of how time works by transmuting its mysterious magic. The wind sands down and erodes the edge of an abacus, and we too sense the soft summer season as it slowly slips into autumn and then winter, swirling into the calligraphy of our own impermanent lives.
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This is so quietly devastating and beautiful. The way the poem moves from teasing beginnings to shared work, and then to that soft, almost unspoken grief—the bag of baby clothes, the test left unseen—carries so much weight without ever naming it outright. The line about “this wild thing we’re trying, again” is what undid me. A rainbow baby, it holds both hope and the memory of something lost. The final image, that delicate act of sanding the edge of an abacus, feels like the perfect metaphor for trying to shape time and meaning after grief. Thank you for this.