Watch on Vimeo or watch on YouTube
Now that winter is finally winding down here in central Pennsylvania, I thought I’d better wrap up a series of winter-themed videopoems I’ve been making. If you follow me on Twitter (@morningporch) or Instagram (@neotoma_magister), you may have already seen some of these (in lower-resolution versions)—indeed, one of the reasons I limited their length to a minute was so I could share them on Instagram.
Almost all of these were shot on an iPhone, with the exception of “cabin fever” which used footage from a game cam which our neighbors kindly installed in the attic of my parents’ house to try and determine how the bait was disappearing from a squirrel trap without triggering the trap. (Turns out an adventuresome short-tailed shrew was the culprit.) The footage that sparked the series was shot by Rachel from Amtrak as she neared Plummer’s Hollow in December; having upgraded to a newer model, she gifted me her previous iPhone, which is the source of almost all the footage here. All the extra sounds are from freesound.org, and all were public domain (CC0), because I wanted to avoid having to include credits in order to provide an uninterrupted, continuous viewing experience of the YouTube playlist or Vimeo album.
The haiku were prompted by the footage and exist in dialogue with it. I present the text below solely for the benefit of the visually impaired, and urge everyone else to experience them as part of the videopoems. This is partly because I think the video medium goes some way toward solving a problem that readers can encounter with haiku on the page (or screen): how to give each one enough time and space? At normal reading speed, much of their suggestive power is lost.
Winter Trees
winter trees
the hobo is missing
one of his fingers
*
January
the shrinking circle
of my needs
*
cold snap
the one-take tune I make
breaking icicles
*
snowflakes
on my bald head
tapping woodpecker
*
subnivean
I tunnel through the day
half awake
*
Groundhog Day
the former coal town living
off a shadow
*
cabin fever
today’s potato flaky
as old wood
*
meltwater pool
the way my reflection
keeps shivering
*
cold moon
of the month I was born
ass-first
*
space
between night-time snowflakes
for warp speed
*
walking the line
on both sides the same
light rime
*
ice form fits
each body
of water
*
a flutter of snowflakes
a flurry of snowbirds
an afterlife of seeds
*
as above
so below
the color of absence
*
Presidents’ Day—
to build a fire
any refuse will do
*
no dark side of the moon
where a Chinese probe
is growing plants
*
unplowed road
someday the mountain itself
will bury us
*
white-footed
the way my memory places
mouse tracks in snow
*
porcupine squeezing
through a deer fence seems
somehow proverbial
*
winter sun
hoisting all its bristles
into the treetops
*
spider on the snow
the granularity of land
underfoot
*
you dance with everything you’ve got
wind
trees