Lines for a cold May

May 20th, 2008

first clear day in weeks
butterflies walk slowly over
the dry forest floor

interrupted ferns’
delicate tips are still clenched
against the cold

in the cold wind
a gnat clings to a bobbing
pink lady’s-slipper

tent caterpillars
the vernal pond quakes under
a coat of leaf-pieces

oak apple gall
I bend down for a closer look
such a fresh green globe

The first two photos are from last week; the others are from yesterday evening.

This entry was posted Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Photos, Plummer's Hollow, Poems & poem-like things and tagged haiku.

9 Responses to “Lines for a cold May”

marja-leena says:

May 20, 2008 at 4:47 pm

Lovely! What a cool name for a fern – ‘interrupted’!

dale says:

May 20, 2008 at 5:27 pm

Loved these — thank you!

Dave says:

May 20, 2008 at 5:49 pm

Glad you liked! Marja-Leena, I have a close-up of the sporangia-bearing pinnae on that same clump of ferns here.

sarah b says:

May 21, 2008 at 6:18 am

Especially love the tent caterpillar confetti.
I can’t believe you are getting lady slippers so early. Actually, given your deer population, I can’t believe you are getting lady slippers at all. Is this in your “exclosure?”

Dave says:

May 21, 2008 at 8:55 am

Actually, they’re right on time. We’ve always had a lot of them, even when our deer numbers were at their height, but they’ve really proliferated as the herd has dwindled. One finds a few nipped blossoms, but I don’t think they’re very tasty.

Anne-Mieke says:

May 21, 2008 at 4:31 pm

Nature can look so strange and pretty.

I like the new look of your blog very much!

Dave says:

May 21, 2008 at 7:07 pm

Thanks. I keep making minor tweaks to the site, but I don’t anticipate any major changes for a while.

Cuidado says:

May 22, 2008 at 6:04 am

The Ladies Slipper is Prince Edward Island’s provincial flower. You’ve captured this one well.

Jennifer says:

May 25, 2008 at 8:36 am

I love this post… the poetry compliments the photos well.

My other projects on the web

Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine I co-edit
Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival I co-founded
Open Micro, a group blog I belong to dedicated to poetry in 140 or fewer characters
Moving Poems, my daily compendium of video poems from YouTube, Vimeo, and beyond
The Morning Porch, Twitter-length prose-poems based on the view from my porch first thing in the morning
Woodrat Photoblog, "a midden of photos from a Pennsylvania mountaintop"
Shadow Cabinet, an online collection of my more recent poems
Spoil, an online collection of my older poems

(For a complete listing, see my Google profile)

Smorgasblog

not native fruit
i find them inspiring because they represent ordinary working-class people expressing their spiritual creativity in a free and exuberant manner. these folks allow their spirit and zest for living to spill out creatively filling space and air with color and sound. against the backdrop of an often grim and always gritty-gray environment they project an alternative.
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Somewhere in NJ
Owls are the stuff of imagination. Seeing these keepers of shadow requires exploring the edges of light... if one fails at it, the fault lies not in the seeing, but instead with one's way of looking.
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Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog
Sometimes the cold was such that I sat with my feet in newspaper-stuffed cardboard boxes to stop my toes from freezing. So there was rigour and hardship of a kind, which is what I wanted. I think perhaps over-idealising solitude might be a failing of creative people.
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Velveteen Rabbi
The sadness arises
again
and cuts my legs
out from under me

the monotony
of trying to soothe
screams as frequent
as the waves...
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Small Change
Camille Claudel hugs the marble child
she made, while Rodin lectures her

on the tyranny of feelings.
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slow reads
I wave at black windows as the orange bus sets. My son, where do you sit? Do you see? look?
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Crackskull Bob
One good thing about drawing snow scenes is you can leave a lot of space blank. Artists are basically lazy, or else you'd find us working down to the Ford plant or whatnot. Instead of losing appendages in machinery or listening to assholes say "How's that report coming, Taylor?" we get to sit around playing with paints, a skill we pretty much mastered in kindergarten.
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Journey to the Center
Some names were as familiar as my own — Argiope aurantia, Anatis mali, Erythemis simplicicollis…. well, there were dozens and dozens of them. In the weeks after we began our fight with cancer, those names would gradually be replaced by the names of chemo agents, bones requiring radiation treatments, drugs available under clinical trials, and so on. Gradually, over time, it was as though some strange cloud of selective amnesia descended upon me.
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Creature of the Shade
One of the most basic pleasures of the Australian landscape, to me, is the complex sensation of being watched by a kangaroo.
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Coyote Crossing
Longing and terror are both of them valid responses to the immensity of this landscape. It seems a shame to me that there are people who have never seen a thing like this, who have never once been out of sight of civilization’s scars upon the earth. Those are the only places I feel whole. What kind of truncated life it must be, to have all your skies dissected by overhead wires, all your earth parceled out in neat lots.
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Via Negativa

How can we live without the unknown before us? —Rene Char