The world can really take your breath away sometimes.

***

I’ve been picking a lot of berries lately, including two trips to a highbush blueberry bog, regular pickings of the blackberries in our old fields, and fistfuls of trailside lowbush blueberries and huckleberries on the ridgetop. There’s a strange intimacy to the act of picking berries, which I tried to bring out in a short series of haiku. (See Woodrat Photohaiku for the accompanying photos.)

*

swamp forest
hugging the bucket
of blueberries

*

blackberry patch
the secret beds
made by deer

*

blueberry woods
a five-legged beetle
takes to the air

*

snagged by thorns
the closeness required
to get free

***

The tiny ants that eat ripe blueberries and the tiny spiders that pray upon them might make a good haiku in more skilled hands than mine. Or even by me on another day. For now, it’s the one that got away. (It was this short, honest!)

*

spiderantiberry

*

crowzaic

***

chance of light
rain in the next hour
glass house

***

The one that doesn’t look like the others: treasured or thought lucky in some cultures, hated and feared in others. It’s all so arbitrary.

***

the
asp
i
ration
bites
me
back

***

“You went for a walk in the rain?”

I never quite know how to answer these questions. But how about this: Any walk is better than no walk, and I own a sturdy umbrella. And since the umbrella keeps off midges and mosquitoes better than anything else, in many ways a walk down the hollow on a humid evening is far more relaxing in the rain.

***

sun atop
the tall tulip polar
trickle of a creek

***

where is the bear?
the bear is any
where a bear can
bear to be
which is every
where you ain’t

***

A well-done parody is also an homage.

The reverse may also be true: an homage that goes all in can become indistinguishable from parody.

***

8:35 PM. Just went to retrieve my cap and put my hand on a Carolina wren already settled in to roost. The alarm was mutual.