I looked up from digging potatoes this morning and saw this:
The world can really take your breath away sometimes.
***
I’ve been picking a lot of berries lately, including two trips to a highbush blueberry bog, regular pickings of the blackberries in our old fields, and fistfuls of trailside lowbush blueberries and huckleberries on the ridgetop. There’s a strange intimacy to the act of picking berries, which I tried to bring out in a short series of haiku. (See Woodrat Photohaiku for the accompanying photos.)
*
swamp forest
hugging the bucket
of blueberries
*
blackberry patch
the secret beds
made by deer
*
blueberry woods
a five-legged beetle
takes to the air
*
snagged by thorns
the closeness required
to get free
***
The tiny ants that eat ripe blueberries and the tiny spiders that pray upon them might make a good haiku in more skilled hands than mine. Or even by me on another day. For now, it’s the one that got away. (It was this short, honest!)
*
spiderantiberry
*
crowzaic
***
chance of light
rain in the next hour
glass house
***
The one that doesn’t look like the others: treasured or thought lucky in some cultures, hated and feared in others. It’s all so arbitrary.
***
the
asp
i
ration
bites
me
back
***
“You went for a walk in the rain?”
I never quite know how to answer these questions. But how about this: Any walk is better than no walk, and I own a sturdy umbrella. And since the umbrella keeps off midges and mosquitoes better than anything else, in many ways a walk down the hollow on a humid evening is far more relaxing in the rain.
***
sun atop
the tall tulip polar
trickle of a creek
***
where is the bear?
the bear is any
where a bear can
bear to be
which is every
where you ain’t
***
A well-done parody is also an homage.
The reverse may also be true: an homage that goes all in can become indistinguishable from parody.
***
8:35 PM. Just went to retrieve my cap and put my hand on a Carolina wren already settled in to roost. The alarm was mutual.
