as old as I am
raw hide
I almost went with another word before “raw”—either still or singing—but in the end decided it was stronger without. I took a snapshot of my showshoe tracks as soon as the haiku occurred to me, but the next photo I took after that turned out to be a stronger, more allusive match. Since a lot of people will probably think of The Blues Brothers when they hear “rawhide,” I figured the comic associations of a speech balloon wouldn’t go amiss.
it’s not my revolution
winter trees
I’ve written so many things about winter trees, I’m forced to get creative… or simply repurpose a famous, if apocryphal, Emma Goldman quote. Trees are a lot of what I see these days. I’ve been leaving the mountain no more than once a week throughout the pandemic, yet I remain a gregarious sort of loner, so in a real sense the trees have become my people. I never get tired of their endless, inventive forms—especially in the winter when they’re all nude, and sometimes dancing very, very slowly.
The font is La Guapita in GIMP, where I’ve just learned how to rotate layers. (Ah for Snapseed’s touchscreen simplicity! But its limitations are severe.)
the upward mobility
of water
Plummer’s Hollow, where I live, is cut into the northeast end of Brush Mountain, a typical long, low ridge in the folded Appalachians, raised above the valleys by differential erosion (and also shaped by periglacial processes during the Ice Ages). It would perhaps make more logical sense to talk of water’s downward mobility, but you know, I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now.
Photo taken from my front porch yesterday morning after the latest snowfall. I’m not sure what the name of this Snapseed font is, but it’s perfect for achieving legibility against a busy background.
my breath freezing
to my beard
Some ridgetop rime where a cloud sat. This was one of two good photos from yesterday’s walk, the other more conventionally pretty. But it was the weird, hood-shaped maple leaf dangling from the wrong end that prompted a haiku.
the weight
of my snowshoes
A rare example of me coming up with a haiku (a week ago) and then looking for a shot to illustrate it. The resulting literalism is suitable I think for a light-hearted haiku (possibly a senryu).
for tea
time alone
This one is dedicated to my hiking buddy L., who does things like this. (One of my favorite possessions is a pocket-sized, hand-bound recipe booklet she made years ago called Tea in the Wild, all about which trees, shrubs and herbs can be made into tea.) The first two lines were sparked by a YouTube video she shared last night about the Nenet reindeer herders of Siberia.
There’s a pernicious belief approaching dogma that haiku must be based on direct, personal experience, as if there’s one, best way to have an ah ha! moment. This ignores the fact that many classic haiku/hokku were products of the imagination (including the most famous haiku of all, about a certain ponderous frog). But it was a popular idea long before Masaoka Shiki codified it at the end of the 19th century. I’d argue that it was a conceptual frame to give haiku a patina of profundity by association with the Zen conceit of satori. Readers of Japanese poetry practice a similar willing suspension of disbelief about death poems, most of which were of course prepared and memorized well before the poet reached the point of death. But if you read them thinking this could have been that poet’s final word, they become so much more powerful. So it is with haiku and the notion of their artless spontaneity.
Speaking of death, slowing down time is the main reason, I think, for drinking tea or coffee (or for smoking, when I used to smoke).
losing parts of words
rodent teeth find
something to gnaw
Ordinarily I’d have gone with “finding” but changed it to fit the newspaper headline and sub-heading style. That came toward the end of two days (appropriately enough) of fiddling around with various textual and font possibilities. Out-takes included “two-day snowstorm my solitude growing voluptuous” and “two-day snowstorm the sudden snap of a mousetrap”.
The fonts are Perpetua Titling MT Bold and Gauge Oblique (which to my eye is indistinguishable from Gauge Italic, but what do I know).
a small bird’s shadow
crossing the snow
Haiku and snapshot both collected on this afternoon’s walk, though I didn’t link the two till I got back. I wanted a cursive font, so I edited it in GIMP on the laptop until I found one that worked. I actually preferred a different font, Rose of Baltimore, which seemed to have a more haiku feel, but the lower-case O’s looked too much like A’s, so for readability’s sake I went with a font called Work in Progress instead, with a kerning of -3. The one thing I neglected to do was to gray it out a bit, so the text ends up being a bit more dominant than I’d like. But since I’m a blogger and not a perfectionist, I’m not going to re-do it now. Lunch is calling.
