Prairie Zen and the World That Doesn't Need Fixing

Prairie Zen is not really interested in escape.

There is no requirement to leave the city, climb a mountain, enter a monastery, or discover some landscape human beings haven't already complicated. Prairie Zen starts wherever you happen to be: beside a road, behind an abandoned building, at the edge of an orchard, looking into a cracked birdbath.

What matters is the quality of attention brought to the place.

Much of modern life teaches us to look at the world and immediately ask what should be done with it. Land should be developed. Buildings should be occupied. Broken things should be replaced. Weeds should be removed. Problems should be solved. Even nature becomes something to manage, improve, photograph, preserve, monetize, or explain.

Prairie Zen asks a quieter question:

What if, for a moment, we didn't fix anything?

These five haiku all encounter worlds that are damaged, abandoned, imperfect, or simply beyond our control. None asks the world to become something else.

1.

cracked birdbath—
the sparrows drinking
from several skies

Illustration by Tré from Vanished Roads by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 

The birdbath is broken. That is the human assessment of the situation.

The sparrows apparently weren't consulted.

The cracks divide the reflected sky into fragments, transforming a defect into multiplicity: not one sky, but several. Nothing about the birdbath has actually been repaired. The poem simply changes what we're capable of seeing.

That's central to Prairie Zen. Acceptance isn't pretending that broken things aren't broken. It is refusing to believe brokenness exhausts their possibilities.

The sparrows still get their water.

And somehow they get several skies with it.

2.

fallen oak—
more places now
for mushrooms

 

Again, the first line appears to announce a loss.

A mature oak has fallen. From the human perspective—and perhaps even from the perspective of someone who loved that particular tree—something important has ended.

But ecosystems don't organize themselves around our preference for keeping things as they are.

The fallen tree becomes habitat. Fungi arrive. Insects arrive. Nutrients return to the soil. Death doesn't disappear from the poem, but neither does life wait politely for our mourning to conclude.

Prairie Zen doesn't offer the comforting cliché that everything happens for a reason.

It suggests something stranger and more observable:

everything that happens becomes part of what happens next.

3.

abandoned glove—
a field mouse
renting the thumb

 

This is the Prairie Zen economy.

Someone lost a glove. Its original purpose is over. To us it has become litter.

The mouse discovers available housing.

The humor matters because Prairie Zen isn't supposed to turn every encounter with nature into a solemn spiritual ceremony. Sometimes paying attention produces wisdom. Sometimes it produces a mouse living in somebody's glove.

The larger idea is still there: usefulness depends upon who's looking.

Human beings declared the glove useless.

The mouse filed different paperwork.

4.

soybean field—
the cellar hole
full of goldenrod

This is a particularly Midwestern kind of archaeology.

A cellar hole means there was once a house. Someone lived there. There were probably meals, arguments, winters, birthdays, repairs, bills, illnesses, mornings when somebody looked out the window and saw essentially the same land.

The house is gone.

Agriculture has absorbed the surrounding landscape, but the old foundation remains—and goldenrod has moved in.

Prairie Zen is deeply interested in places where different kinds of time overlap. Human history says: someone lived here.

The goldenrod says nothing.

It grows.

Neither cancels the other.

5.

field mowing—
the tractor
going around something

This may be the quietest poem of the five.

We aren't told what the tractor avoids.

A nest? A stone? Wildflowers? A fawn? A wet patch? Something the farmer remembers? Something we're not capable of guessing?

The absence of an explanation is the point.

For a moment, efficiency yields.

The straight line bends around something.

Prairie Zen lives in that bend.

It doesn't demand that human beings disappear from the landscape. The tractor belongs here too. So does agriculture. So does work. The interesting moment occurs when the person operating the machine recognizes that something else has a claim on the field.

We never learn what that something is.

We only see the accommodation.

Going Around Something

That final image may provide a useful way of understanding Prairie Zen itself.

We spend enormous portions of our lives trying to make the world travel in straight lines. We plan. Categorize. Improve. Remove obstacles. Repair cracks. Replace broken objects. Clear fields. Fill holes. Decide which things are useful and which things should be thrown away.

And the world keeps refusing to cooperate.

Oak trees fall.

Gloves disappear.

Houses vanish.

Birdbaths crack.

Something is in the field.

Prairie Zen isn't resignation. It isn't passivity, and it isn't an instruction to stop caring about what happens.

It's an acknowledgment that we are participants in a world containing innumerable other participants, most of whom have never heard our plans.

Sometimes wisdom is fixing what is broken.

Sometimes it's recognizing that the sparrows are already drinking from it.

And sometimes it's simply going around something.

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Vanished Roads Thomas L. Vaultonburg

 In late 2019, my life became much smaller.

A ten-year relationship ended. I lost a home, daily contact with children I loved, longtime friendships, and a place within an arts community that had shaped much of my adult life. The future I had imagined for myself suddenly no longer existed. Before I could begin rebuilding, the world itself contracted. The COVID-19 pandemic closed doors for everyone, including many of the paths I might have taken to reconnect with the people, places, and opportunities I felt I had lost.

Then, in 2020, I suffered a stroke.

Looking back, it seems almost inevitable that I would find my way to haiku.

At a time when everything around me appeared to be shrinking, I was drawn to a literary form built on economy, attention, and presence. I began studying Buddhism and, more specifically, Soto Zen. What started as curiosity gradually became practice. I found myself less interested in explaining the world and more interested in experiencing it directly. Haiku offered a way to do that.

My earliest attempts were often little more than narrative poems wearing haiku clothing. I brought with me the habits I had developed over decades of writing lyric and narrative poetry. I wanted to tell stories, explain emotions, and make sure readers understood what I meant. Over time, however, the poems began teaching me something different. Instead of using haiku to express myself, I became interested in disappearing into the moment itself.

The result was not merely a change in writing style. It was a change in how I moved through the world.

Vanished Roads chronicles that journey.

The collection begins in grief and disorientation. It acknowledges loss—the loss of loved ones, relationships, identities, expectations, and familiar ways of living. Yet it is not a book about remaining lost. It is a book about what happens when the old maps stop working.

During this period, I reconnected with one of my oldest friends, Tré. Together we began a creative partnership that opened new possibilities in both art and life. In many ways, her presence marks the turning point of the collection. A door opens. A path appears where none seemed possible before.

As the book progresses, the poems become less concerned with the self and more concerned with the world beyond it. Roads disappear. Rivers, mountains, forests, weather, and animals take their place as teachers. The journey becomes less about recovering what was lost and more about learning how to walk forward without needing to recover it.

The title poem contains the image that best captures the spirit of the collection: a traveler asks for directions and is handed a map of vanished roads. That is the predicament many of us eventually face. The paths that once defined us disappear. The question then becomes whether we can continue the journey anyway.

These haiku are my attempt to answer yes.

Vanished Roads June 21st From Wolf Twin Books

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