Hitch Haiku

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.