Hitch Haiku Poem by Gary Snyder

They didn't hire him
so he ate his lunch alone:
the noon whistle

* * *


Cats shut down
deer thread through
men all eating lunch



* * *



Frying hotcakes in a dripping shelter
Fu Manchu
Queets Indian Reservation in the rain



* * *



A truck went by

three hours ago:
Smoke Creek desert



* * *



Jackrabbit eyes all night

breakfast in Elko.



* * *



Old kanji hid by dirt

on skidroad Jap town walls

down the hill

to the Wobbly hall



Seattle



* * *



Spray drips from the cargo-booms
a fresh-chipped winch
spotted with red lead
young fir—
soaking in summer rain



* * *



Over the Mindanao Deep



Scrap brass
dumpt off the fantail
falling six miles



* * *



[The following two were written on classical
themes while travelling through Sappho, Washington.

The first is by Thomas L. Hoodlatch.]



Moonlight on the burned-out temple—
wooden horse shit.


Sunday dinner in Ithaca—
the twang of a bowstring



* * *



After weeks of watching the roof leak

I fixed it tonight
by moving a single board



* * *



A freezing morning in October in the high
Sierra crossing Five Lakes Basin to the

Kaweahs with Bob Greensfelder and Claude Dalenburg



Stray white mare
neck rope dangling
forty miles from farms.


* * *



Back from the Kaweahs



Sundown, Timber Gap
—sat down—
dark firs.
dirty; cold;
too tired to talk



* * *



Cherry blossoms at Hood river
rusty sand near Tucson
mudflats of Willapa Bay


* * *



Pronghorn country


Steering into the sun
glittering jewel-road
shattered obsidian



* * *



The mountain walks over the water!
Rain down from the mountain!
high bleat of a
cow elk
over blackberries


* * *


A great freight truck
lit like a town
through the dark stony desert


* * *


Drinking hot saké
toasting fish on coals
the motorcycle
out parked in the rain.


* * *

Switchback


turn, turn,

and again, hard-
scrabble

steep travel a-

head.