Continuing on from Winter Trees, this cycle contains 24 videohaiku one minute long or shorter, all but one shot on an iPhone without any advance planning, just capturing things of visual interest and letting them prompt haiku a day or more later. (The exception, “coal country spring”, uses old home movie footage that came to me in a similar serendipitous fashion: via @HomeMoviesBot on Twitter.)
As with Winter Trees, I feel that these are best experienced as they unfold, scroll-like, in the video series (which Vimeo now calls a showcase—previously album—and YouTube calls a playlist), in part of course because the visuals and audio are meant to add an extra dimension to the haiku, as with any videopoem. I am composing as much with video editing software as with the pen, and some of the haiku fall a little flat on the page. But here’s a transcription of the texts for the visually impaired:
shedding its snow
the new
old mountain
*
March wind
the first rose-colored
vulture face
*
counting the rings
in the wood frog pond
another year
*
yellow-bellied sapsucker
tapping
its true name
*
former field
the ruffed grouse makes a drum
out of thin air
*
bee or not
the daffodils
keeping faith
*
sun-drenched woods
the first violets
are yellow
*
fake flowers
where they found his body
fly fishing
*
Good Friday
despite claw and knife marks
they’re no one’s beeches
*
wind flowers
the way Beethoven heard
an ode to joy
*
budburst time
the returned vet says he went
straight to the woods
*
spring rain
learning that Dad
has Parkinson’s
*
railroad ties
crowd the vanishing point
fiddleheads
*
such a rush
to come back from the dead
April heat
*
coal country spring
all her doll’s new
imaginary friends
*
tweeting
about the #MetGala
watch your step
*
red eft—
how salamandery
this path
*
painted trillium
already going limp
catch and release
*
this habit
of inhabiting hills
the ants and me
*
clouds lifting
the valley’s visible
clear to the bare earth
*
spring woods at dusk
a daytime firefly
flutters past
*
green green
the broken boughs hiding
that murdered girl
*
nitrous moon
your balloon voice gone
far and wee
*
hatchlings
do you miss the hard shell
of a perfect world?
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