Trying to find the words for a rock oak on the mountainside above the railroad tracks—its grace, its furrowed bark, its long translation of sun into solid presence—I find myself settling instead for a kind of stillness, one that seems prepared for the deepest of descents or the most deliberate of dances.
freight train
saying everything
I meant
Leaning into the haiga-as-poetry-comics idea, this time with a whole-ass haibun. Since haibun need to have titles these days, I stole one from an old blues song.
The text, including the prose, arrived at just about the same time as the photo on a walk the other day. I suppose my poetry-comics impulse here comes from wanting to make a virtue out of using a baldly illustrative image. I am pleased with the way the prose emerges from a kind of thin mental fog, to which the haiku serves as a riposte.
Revised 9/1/2021 to replace “long gathering of sunlight” with “long translation of sun.” I rearranged the text a bit while I was at it.
Woodrat photohaiku 