the wild gestures of one
living alone
My favorite tree along my favorite section of Pennsylvania’s Mid State Trail. It stands apart, growing in the middle of a patch of mossy, ridge-top boulders. It’s a black birch, not a yellow birch, so it’s probably near the end of its lifetime.
to a moss-covered log
heron wingbeats
I didn’t happen to get a photo of what prompted this haiku two days ago, so I snapped this today to try to approximate it.
the standing dead
turn blue
An image-prompted ku, obviously. My first attempt, which I almost went with, was more conventional:
autumn woods
saving the best colors
for dead trees
But that made me yawn, so I slept on it and came up with the above instead.
that inevitable cliché
the deplorable rightness of nature
Black gum leaves in the first photo; a red-tailed hawk and northern watersnake black rat snake locked in combat for the rather more dramatic second haiga. Both snake and hawk lived, as far as I know. I had to move them in order to drive past, so I turned the hawk over with a stick and as soon as both wings were free, it flew very unsteadily off, and the snake headed for the stream at top speed. I suspect the hawk had been badly bitten (painful, but not venomous) and perhaps suffered a concussion when it hit the ground. It wasn’t moving when I discovered them.
I went for a twelve-mile walk to shake some thoughts loose, and the two haiku came as a pair just before I got back to the car. It’s a useful challenge, I think, to hold two competing ideas in mind without favoring one or the other: that life is duḥkha, and that our sense of order and beauty ultimately derives from nature.
returning to the grove
he planted
Old Man of the Woods (Strobilomyces strobilaceus) is the bolete pictured here, in a grove of Norway spruce that my dad and mom planted in 1975, and where both have expressed a desire to be buried.
eyes closed at last
the world that had him in it
disappears
*
moonlit forest
the giant
my father was
*
empty house
the sounds a refrigerator makes
when it isn’t humming
In memoriam Bruce D. Bonta (1941-2021)
with one eye open
it’s his vigil too
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
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.
holes in mushroom parasols
This is sort of on the line between haiku and senryu, I think, but the choice of image with a speech balloon for the text pushes it over into senryu territory. In fact because of that, I altered the text to refer to mushroom parasols in general, instead of “a mushroom parasol,” which would be more sabishii.
