In the sun’s house we saw for the first time what a complete absence of nuance would look like. How irresistible it would be.
insomniac eyelids on strike for overtime
In the sun’s house
Category: haibun
Two trains running
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.
volunteer tomato
holding its children up
to the sun
The image sparked the haiku, and when I went to post it on Instagram, I saw that Noah Davis had a post of himself reading poetry in his tomato patch, so I dedicated the haiku to him. Noah grew up around here, and he and his father Todd Davis (also a poet) hunt deer on our mountain, so I’ve kind of watched him grow up. His first collection, Of This River, was one of my favorite reads of the past year.
mayfly dance
the cloying scent
of azaleas
Thinking I don’t have any new haiku, then looking at the notes on my phone from last week… oh, right.
This is the Strawberry Blossom font: wonderfully calligraphic, but with strong perfume-advertisement vibes. Which seemed perfect here.
Dutchman’s breeches
April clouds drift to a soundtrack of traffic. It could be anywhere, but it isn’t just anywhere, it’s the eastern part of western Pennsyltucky.
Dutchman’s breeches
trembling in the breeze
of passing trucks
The font used here, as for a number of these haiga lately, is called Gloss and Bloom, which seems appropriate.
Road cuts end up serving as wildflower refugia in many places for two simple reasons: they’re often moist with seeps, and white-tailed deer don’t hang out there.
unfinished
Some stumps of felled hemlocks may be kept on life support for decades by adjacent relatives, with their interconnected roots serving as feeding tubes. Other species might send up new sprouts, but that’s not within the hemlock’s skill set. You can recognize living stumps by the scar tissue that continues to grow over the cut, adding new growth rings, trying somehow to recover.
unfinished
with its commitments
living stump
the spring sun now
only a taste
Thanks to my hiking buddy L. for spotting this and another living stump nearby on a walk near Huntingdon, PA yesterday. In her honor I used a font called Slyfaen (it’s an inside joke). I couldn’t compress everything I wanted into a haiku, so it became a tanka. So this isn’t properly a haiga (or, with the prose, a haibun) but something similar.
Smell Pox
My latest video haibun. For text and notes (and to browse others in the series), please visit Via Negativa.
I’ve posted a few haiku videos here before, as it occurred to me. I’ll try to make a habit of it from now on. They’re very much of a piece with my still-photo haiga. No less than Jim Kacian, the guy behind Red Moon Press and The Haiku Foundation as well as a brilliant haijin in his own right, prefers to call haiku films video haiga.
