Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
reblogged from Woodrat photohaiku
trail
turning dappled salamander
tail
curl
of an ache an oak
burl
one watery
eye between them
conjoined oaks
the shine of white-
haired youth
tussock moth
winding
up here
wild grapevine
ravished
by the wind
mother oak
What does it mean to look forward to something any more, in a world hurtling toward ecological collapse if not thermonuclear destruction? There was a bestseller back in the 1970s called Future Shock about the social and psychological damage incurred by modern society’s relentless drive toward progress… or so I imagine, having never actually read it. But it’s been on my mind lately despite that minor detail. I’ve also been thinking a lot about ignorance, both in epistemological and sociological terms, and not coming to any firm conclusions because I rarely do. That’s a poet thing, I suppose. Not knowing the future, though, seems essential to mere survival, let along progress, as the Rene Char quote in the sidebar here says: “How can we live without the unknown before us?”
This has been a horrific summer in many parts of North America, but here in central Pennsylvania we went from a severe spring drought to a very wet but relatively cool summer. Trees went from nearly dropping their leaves at the beginning of June to massive growth spurts in July—aided, I’m sure, by all the extra CO2 in the atmosphere. And part of what kept things cool for us was the haze from burning forests elsewhere, as I’ve mentioned in various poems. But one of the pleasures of haiku is being liberated from having to explain things. They can just lurk in the background, mostly inaudible to the reader. Distant flashes that can mean whatever you want them to.
The fireflies, who had been scarce early on, had their highest numbers toward the end of the season. I shot this 30-second clip of them on my phone at dusk last week, just as the weather was turning from muggy to cool. Three nights ago the katydids started up; in a week or so, their throb will be all we hear. I look forward to weeks of good sleep.
It’s that time of year again,
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour
Although, of course,
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Quite. Or as Dickinson says,
Pink — small — and punctual —
Aromatic — low —
Covert — in April —
Candid — in May —
Since Luisa and I each write (at least) a poem a day year-round, Na/GloPoWriMo isn’t as big a deal here as it might be elsewhere. But I thought it worth mentioning some other poetic dailiness that I don’t think we mean to be covert about. Via Negativa readers might want to follow along with Luisa’s daily curation of poems by Virginia poets on Norfolk’s Slover Library website.
As for me, I suppose it’s worth mentioning that I revived my micropoetry blog Woodrat photohaiku at the beginning of the year, with a new photo haiga almost every day. There’s a form in the sidebar there that you can fill out to get new posts in your inbox (though the quality of the emailed photos isn’t as high as on the site), and/or you can simply follow me on Instagram or Facebook and see the photos there. I’ve taken to adding a few additional thoughts or process notes on the blog.
Here’s today’s offering, followed by a couple of other favorites. Click on the photos to read the original posts.
*
*
I lost my sense of smell for just two days. When it came back, the first odor I noticed was soil, which still surprises me this time of year. When I was a kid, the only time the temperature rose above freezing in January was for a few days of warm weather toward the end of the month, a little false spring we called January Thaw.
white clippings
from my haircut
winter garden
Rachel went back to work after a ten-day self-quarantine. She had what might’ve been the common cold, though five of the other people who looked after the same special-needs person tested positive for Covid. That’s the hell of it, the not knowing whether one might be infectious or immune.
winter
afternoon moon
where’s your shadow
***
This went through so. many. drafts. That’s in part because I had several haiku that worked with it, but didn’t have any particularly amazing footage. In the end, yesterday’s moon got me where I needed to go, I think: Absence was my true subject all along. I uploaded it last night, but this morning had one more tweak, that lens-warp fade in. I felt it needed something, but wasn’t sure what until I discovered that effect.
1. Amazing Grace
I mistook dysphoria for euphoria once on purpose, and it almost worked. When you live in the forest, winter—not summer—is the season of light. And so an empty plate became the full moon, and the mouse in my filing cabinet was a companion animal. I could sometimes hear her late at night, shredding my old poems for nesting material. I meanwhile was building a cenotaph out of cigarette butts. My disemboweled television watched over me while I slept.
last cigarette
as long as grass grows
or rivers run
2. Song Dogs
Three days before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, my friend L. and I get lost on a hike above a dammed-up river, too busy arguing about politics to notice that we’ve branched off onto the wrong logging road. The sun is going down. On the ridge above us, coyotes start singing. Their melismatic solos intertwine in a way that can’t be called dissonant, though Lord knows it’s nothing as simple as harmony.
no longer lost
that hole in the clouds
far upslope
What does it mean to be average? When a computer averages the features from hundreds of faces, the resulting image will look like a supermodel. This tells us that what is average is not necessarily common, and vice versa.
But I love the idea of this perfect face held in common, each of us contributing our own small part to it. Together we are conventionally beautiful. As individuals we can be uncommonly beautiful.
first day of fall
a harrow’s
yellow teeth
It’s the autumn equinox, one of two days a year with perfectly average durations of day and night. I look west to see the sunrise reddening the ridge till it’s as flushed as the face of my British wife after one drink. My uncommonly beautiful lover, whom I see now only by web conferencing software. The soft wear of her. The solid-state drive of her.
And of course our dilemma is as common as COVID. The law of averages may be on our side as individuals, but who wants to take a chance on being average? The only way out is if we each contribute our piecemeal vulnerability to the common good.
marsh hawk
the draft horses with
their blinders on
***
Although the pandemic is far from over, I felt the need to wrap up the Pandemic Season series since my haibun seem to be heading in a different direction. In a reverse of my usual pattern (which I described the other day in a talking-head video solicited for a videopoem workshop), I actually wrote the haibun first (on, you guessed it, the autumn equinox) and then shot the video.
The haiku came from a drive through the neighboring valley, where the clay is yellowish brown and at least half the farms are Amish now, I think. I played with the idea of a spring tooth harrow in autumn, but ultimately decided that was too much, too clever for the kind of haiku needed here. And yes, I know we’re supposed to call marsh hawks harriers now, but I like the older name.
Since the goldenrod in the video is dancing, the soundtrack clearly needed something with a beat. I searched ccMixter for experimental folk music and quickly discovered this track by the user Anchor, which seemed perfect. They uploaded it back on April 5, describing it as “a musical prayer/plea which hopefully, the more beneficent forces of the unknown universe and the altruistic higher nature of humankind might project as a lodestar of Hope in troubled times.”
“On Monday, Iowa was leveled by what amounted to a level-two hurricane. But you wouldn’t know that from reading, listening to or watching the news.”
That’s how the Washington Post began its belated coverage.
With so little air travel happening these days, we might need a new term for “flyover country.” How about “slow internet country”? Or, given the widespread collapse of local reporting, “low information country”?
Is keeping people ignorant and disempowered the goal, or simply the unintended consequence of greed, callousness, corruption, and propaganda coming together in what one must inevitably characterize as a perfect storm?
When you know that you don’t know: then and only then will true words begin to appear.
in a dream
I can’t finish a haiku
[crickets]
***
Having made a video haibun focusing on katydids, it was probably inevitable that I’d follow up with crickets. For what it’s worth, I really was struggling to compose a haiku in a dream the other morning. Later, I had the idea of playing with the pop-culture definition of crickets as silence or absence of any intelligible response, and the prose came quickly after that.
The source video was something I’d downloaded from Prelinger’s home movie collection a few days ago, not knowing how or whether I’d use it. I decided to edit the shots to change at the beginning of sentences in order to give the otherwise rather prosy bun section a more formal kind of rhythm.
Originally I ended with this:
even in a dream
I can’t write a good haiku
[here there be crickets]
which amused me since it was clearly a senryu disguised as a self-reflexive, 17-syllable folk haiku. But I went with the more serious and concise one in part because of the interesting (I hope) ambiguity about what it is I can’t finish.
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?
trompe-l’oeil on Regent Street
painted woman lounging
in a shop window