Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
See also my Woodrat photoblog and my Flickr account.
Those old dressmaker’s dummies
that extremely tasteful shops
love to use in their window displays
do compel the eye pull at your mood
with their pale-flesh patina
catching light and shadows
and the sheer vulnerability
of headless limbless torsos
sometimes even a central seam
like the scar of drastic surgery
and holes that shockingly evoke
heart and sex.
(Sept. 2007)
The sun is without warmth now,
but strong and low and
floods
into your eyes,
dances
on your skin,
and on the pale wine
in your glass.
(Sept. 2015)
Eight autumns on, still needing
to remind yourself:
enjoy
this
while it lasts!
Up by 4 a-clock. And up looking over my work, what they did yesterday; and am pretty well pleased, but I find it will be long before they have done, though the house is cover-d and I free from the weather.
We met and sat all the morning, and at noon was sent for by my Uncle Wight to Mr. Rawlinson’s, and there we had a pigg, and Dr Fairebrother came to me to see me and dined with us. And after dinner he went away, and I by my uncles desire stayed; and there he begun to discourse about our difference with Mr. Young about Flaggs, pleading for him, which he did desire might be made up; but I told him how things was, and so he was satisfied and said no more. So home and above with my workmen, who I find busy and my work going on pretty well. And so to my office till night; and so to eat a bit and so to bed.
long pig—
our difference is no more
and so I eat
Erasure haiku derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 16 August 1662.
Our family photo albums are like a lot of family photo albums, I suppose: pictures of birthday parties, babies in the bathtub, Christmas with the grandparents, etc. But one thing sets my parents’ snapshots apart: the vast majority of them were taken outside. As soon after my February birth as it became possible, I was taken out to explore.
Of course, it wasn’t unusual for kids to play outside back in the 60s and 70s. But since my parents never bought a TV, we had even less reason than most kids to stay indoors. Continue reading “Imprinting on nature”
https://www.flickr.com/photos/89056025@N00/15276010103/
They call this place Fisherman’s Paradise. The fish must look forward to winter as a respite from all the fly fishermen. “Of course, you can’t actually eat the fish here,” my brother Mark said. “They’re much too full of toxins from agricultural runoff.”
Continue reading “Thanksgiving walk in Spring Creek Canyon”
For any American who grew up during the Cold War, Berlin was a city torn between two worlds: the Kodachrome present of Western consumerist culture and what we imagined to be the gray, regimented East, still scarred by the war and therefore to be pictured in the grainy black-and-white of old newsreels.
Continue reading “Berlin in black-and-white”
The first thing to know about Berlin is that it has many walls — and there is graffiti on almost all of them. Continue reading “On Berlin walls”
I found this photo in my camera when I went to download my Stockholm airport photos. I took it in late August, I think. There’s a spicebush (Lindera benzoin) next to my front door, and the fact that this spicebush swallowtail caterpillar was now climbing the storm door suggests it was in its last instar and looking for a place to pupate. The fake eye-spots on its butt are of course evolution’s way of protecting it from predators (mostly birds).
I got to thinking about the photo in the shower this morning. Perhaps I could post it to my sadly neglected Woodrat photohaiku blog? Then my mind wandered to certain people — you know the type I’m sure — and I came up with:
big fake eyes
your real gaze is in the glass
poor caterpillar
Not bad, but “glass” was too ambivalent (it could mean a drink), while “mirror” would be a little too much (especially given the final “r” sounds of “poor” and “caterpillar”). And what was supposed to be a sympathetic final line just sounded condescending, an insult compounding the injury of anthropomorphism.
where to pupate?
the caterpillar’s own green
repels her now
I wasn’t dissatisfied with this, either, but it seemed altogether too cerebral for a proper haiku. I just wasn’t ready to accept that I couldn’t pack a bit of nature education into (approximately) 17 syllables. This despite the obvious fact that the species name itself was much too long to fit.
big fake eyes
the poor caterpillar’s
only defense
The more I pondered it, the more laden with significance this caterpillar became — poor thing, indeed! I had strayed pretty far from the spirit of haiku, but who cares? I was having fun.
big fake eyes
searching for a quiet spot
to don black wings
This semi-surrealist take would be, if nothing else, a good fit for the Halloween season, I thought. Why not?
I was tired; I had gotten up after only four hours of sleep so I could make bread this morning. I caught myself staring.
big fake stare
the caterpillar is tired
of being a caterpillar
And that, for better or worse, is the one I went with. Spontaneous insights are damn hard work sometimes.
Sweden’s Arlanda airport is an $40 train ride from the Stockholm city center ($80 round-trip), and thanks to congestion at JFK, my eight-hour layover had dwindled to just five-and-a-half hours, not all of it in daylight. I weighed my options as I ate lunch in a randomly selected airport restaurant. Then I noticed the flowers on my table were real, and moreover were seasonal wildflowers — some kind of native aster, it appeared, along with a sprig of spearmint. If these people are as nuts about nature as I’d always heard, surely it must be possible to go walking right outside the airport, I thought. Continue reading “A nature walk at the airport”
It’s been less than three weeks since I returned from Cornwall, but already the alembic of memory is distilling the random incidents of that trip into stories fit for re-telling. One such story I’ve begun to think of as the Mystery of the Dead Hand. Continue reading “The Mystery of the Dead Hand”