On June 15th, 1978, a month after I had retired, I checked into the Clinique Ponce de León in Playa Zipolite, Oaxaca, to undergo the infamous monkey gland operation. To celebrate my retirement, my extended family had given me several items which have been dear to me ever since. The first of these was Cor van den Heuvel’s The Haiku Anthology, and from the day I arrived at the clinic, I began to write haiku about my experiences. The other was a microscope, and a copy of Jahn, Bovee, and Jahn’s How to Know the Protozoa. While recuperating from my surgery, I encountered Jim Brandon’s catalog of egnartiana, Weird America; after I persuaded Fayaway, the impossibly beautiful nurse’s assistant who was attending to me, to leave the clinic with me, she & I set out on a quest, its itinerary determined almost entirely by chance, and in a Travelall leased from none other than the infamous Vandal Drummond, to the places described in Brandon’s book. If there was a body of water nearby, I would go on a side quest for local microcritters, and it seemed a natural extension of my new found hobby to portray both critter and paranormal hotspot in haiku form. Since I am a poor visual artist, and Fay & I don’t believe in cameras, and since Fayaway destroys all of her artworks on her birthday every year, these are the only extant records of our journeys.

I have written these haiku on scraps of paper for many years now, and Fay, coming upon them in odd corners of my study, declared that they should be published where everyone could read them. Hence, this project.

[I’ve linked to my reviews of Weird America 

and How to Know the Protozoa] 

June 16, 1978

Zipolite, Oaxaca