Lines for a wet summer

gravel piles

A wet summer.
At the entrance to the hollow,
twin peaks of gravel.

*

Storm-carved ruts
on the gravel driveway
fill up with hailstones.

*

damselfly

Blue damselflies
patrol the slow-moving waters
of the blueberry bog.

*

Done berry picking,
I wash the bog mud off my legs
with brown bog water.

*

Morning thunder,
then rain. “It’s just getting it out
of its system, right?”

*

An indoor picnic.
The child climbs the steep stairs
to the green room.

*

shirt window

In lieu of a curtain,
a checkered shirt catches
the evening sun.

Filed in Photos, Poems & poem-like things and tagged . Bookmark the permalink. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.Print Print

8 Responses to Lines for a wet summer

  1. Rachel says:

    Ethan tells me it’s been mighty wet in western Massachusetts, too, over the weeks since I left town.

    The greenery in your photographs here amazes me. I’m going to be bowled over next week when I get back to the Berkshires. Seven weeks in the desert has changed my sense of light and color something fierce.

  2. SvenWaring says:

    I admire the rhythm of these, Dave.
    Somehow it has the spirit of haiku, beyond form.
    And air becomes wind.

  3. Jarrett says:

    A beautiful string of haikus. And the poems are great, too.

    And I’m so relieved that even a man of your discernment owns one of those universal plastic deck chairs.

    ;-)

    J

  4. excellent selection of haiku and photos, its a wet summer here too…

  5. miguel says:

    Damselflies are murder to try to photograph. I bet you couldn’t get any closer than that!

  6. dale says:

    My favorite here is:

    Done berry picking,
    I wash the bog mud off my legs
    with brown bog water.

    The alliteration is so neat and so unorthodox.

  7. lissa says:

    lovely particularly the last image and poem. very clever stuff.

  8. Dave says:

    Thanks for the comments.

    Rachel – Yeah, your eyes are gonna hurt for a while. Deserts are a real aesthetic pleasure for me. the few times I’ve visited them, I didnt want to leave. Fortunately, I like forests almost as much.

    SvenWaring – Glad you liked these. Rhythm is alost inescable with my stuff, regardless of the genre – I can’t help but be guided by it.

    Jarrett – The chair I sit in every morning while I drink my coffee is a plastic stack chair. Extremely comfortable. But ultimately disposable, because when they break, they can’t be repaired. So I suppose I should deplore them, shouldn’t I?

    CGP – Thanks. We’ve had wetter years, but it’s been a while.

    miguel – Yeah, I was frustrated that the clarity wasn’t there to feature this one on the photo blog, cuz I was so pleased with the composition.

    dale – That may be my favorite of the lot as well – and as usual with haiku, it was the easiest to write.

    lissa – Oh good, a vote for that one! That was my favorite of the photos, but I wasn’t sure if the haiku quite did it justice. Thanks.

Leave a Reply

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

URLs are converted to links, and three or more links in one comment will cause it to be sent to the moderation queue. Constructive criticism is always welcome. You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

  • Smorgasblog

    • Metaphors for the Moon
      Early marriage is a wetland, a marsh
      of co-mingling reeds, breeding birds.

    • Cleaning My Attic
      Cast-iron Royal, weighty and not regal at all but seriously proletarian, ostensibly portable in your anonymous black case: my secret unmusical instrument, which I lugged to cafes before they were wireless or even wired...

    • Clumps and Voids
      The program description, however, devolves into the fey. "The lingam (or linga) is a cylindrical votary object that represents the Hindu god Shiva, and a dispute about its meaning has been going on for many centuries." When a phallus is tagged with the museum label of "cylindrical votary object," I lose hope that the speaker will be introduced as Professor Wendy Doniger: don of dongs.

    • botanizing
      On calm days, the soil swirls and rises in isolated twisters. On a windy day when the wheat is being harvested — a day like today — the soil lifts like a yellow curtain, obliterating the sky.

    • The Twitching Line
      My uncle, gutting a fish:
      removing the fins from either side,
      tipping the knife below

      the little anus, pointing the tail-
      end away, slitting it to the gills,
      then plunging in a hand

      to scoop the organs out, soft
      and scarlet as a litter of kittens.

    • The Ordinary and the Wild
      I had a dream the other night about a tall machine, like a crane or an android giraffe, lanky with angles of metal that reach up to the sky when they should somehow be digging. When I woke I felt taller for a moment, and also deeper, as if the soles of my feet had met up with some spilled honey or errant tar while I walked in my sleep.

    • Busily Seeking... Continual Change
      So the mountain was steep? I threw a couple of windbreakers, yogurts and miscellaneous snacks (really, whatever I could lay my hands on at the last minute), wallet, phone, bottles of water--yes, just the things I thought to grab into a new REI bright yellow daypack--and off we went. That was it. Toss things in a bag and go.

    • Chatoyance
      And on the other side, what I
      set in motion: the open field, the low hill,
      a crease scored in bent blades of grass
      where I forgot the wall stood,
      my footsteps blurring as the
      grass unbends.

    • Velveteen Rabbi
      There are trade-offs: in the womb we knew perfect intimacy, but couldn't meet. Now we are separate, which is at once the source of loneliness (especially for him, I'm guessing) and the source of our ability to connect.

    • Will Buckingham
      My small guide and I then did our double-act of worshipping at the shrine, at which point the monk then declared that, once again, I was not doing it right. There followed another twenty minute lesson in proper bowing -- different from the previous lesson, in fact -- and if I have retained anything it is that one’s feet must be aligned like the lines in the number 8 -- an auspicious number in China.

  • "On the whole I concentrated on things and people that I found charming and splendid; my notes are also full of poems and observations on trees and plants, birds and insects."
    — Sei Shonagon, 994 A.D.

`