consort, with fireflies

An evening of Renaissance winds in a cloistered tent on prairie's edge. As dusk deepens to blue, fireflies rise from prairie fields and grass and tall flowers under cypress. Green pulse on stem of tiger lily, cupped in hand reflecting. Bronze lions watch these moving lights. Whine and throb of ancient pipe and reed. A skirl of dance marks time to the finger-tapped drum. Redwing blackbird in the bower sings counterpoint to sacred chant, while crickets drum in corners. Unbroken consort of recorders. Voices tuned to rhythm and pace of breath. We are still as rapt grass in windless rows. Night's shadow line crawls high behind this brightened stage. Long intertwined counterpoint of melody weaves spirals and leaves in air filled with weaving pulsing light. Long past the blue hour in still twilight lights scatter along the road. These darkened fields full of life turn to rush towards light. All alone in the alien darkness of empty backroads winding past lost hearths, I drive homewards through crowded firefly constellations.

prairie evening
concert lit by fireflies:
ancient music

Writing: Gathering Stems and Branches

There's a writing project I want to start in on. I spent the first part of the morning going through and marking entries in my handwritten journal going back around six years. Marking things I'd written out, but never turned into anything. Some of those pages can be the partial seed of what I want to write now. Formally, zuihitsu, a compilation of things written following the brush. "Twenty-Four Views of Mt. Fuji by Hokusai." Modular. Fragmentary. Linked by mood, topic, tone. Memory books. Pillow Books.

Went into my library to pull out and re-read, or at least skim, some touchstones for what I want to do. Saikaku. The Great Mirror of Male Love. Kenko. Essays In Idleness. Other more modern examples of the form, which after all is an infinitely malleable form. Basho. Oku no hosomichi.

Writing this project will be partially rewriting bits and pieces scattered here and there, bringing them together, making a larger work out of them. Maybe chapbook sized. I'm a good prose writer, although I don't have much ear for fiction. Creative nonfiction is also storytelling, though. I can invent and write if I allow myself to fiction as storytelling, and not wedded to that boring No-Style Style that dominates so much fiction nowadays, the so-called "plain" style.

In reading a literary biography of Roger Zelazny, which I acquired recently, I realize how much he influenced me as a writer of prose. As the book points out, spending a whole chapter on the topic, Zelazny's prose style was always poetic, laced with poetry, frequently requiring a bit of work to get into, but one it revealed itself, sublime. His short "experimental" novel Creatures of Light and Darkness is astounding. It should be taught alongside Wallace Stevens.

That's the only kind of prose fiction I can see myself actually writing: prose fiction that doesn't read like prose fiction. And his short stories, always poetic and sometimes heartbreakingly powerful. Poetic prose that is often oblique, rarely plain.

After reading through old journals this morning, I wrote some notes for what I want to do. Not an outline, never that, just the rule-set for this particular game. Once you write the melody, you improvise around it. Writing prose, for me, to be interesting at all has to be more like jazz, knowing sort of where I'm going but it's 32 bars ahead so take your time and explore the path meanwhile.

This writing project does fall in the category of being prompted, which I know is how I work best. I do well when someone asks me for a piece. Otherwise, I can be lazy, and never get around to it. I love having a deadline, and a goal, and a completion date. I actually work well under deadline pressure.

I also work well when I'm not trying to do anything. When I'm out on a roadtrip, for example, where on those long drives across the land, I do some of my best thinking, and write in my handwritten journal at night, and sometimes in the morning, about whatever I'm experiencing, or thinking about. That's how the elements of the longer haibun sequences of Basin and Range were written, compiled later at home. I scatter a lot of short bits off the back of the wagon, when I roam, and sometimes they add up later.

I'm still gathering. After weeks of thinking about it, at least there's a goal. Awareness of approaching deadlines is my goad. Meanwhile, just keep gathering these loose stems and branches, to build them, and fire them. Ashes and raku to emerge.

Clouds from Many Angles

I take fast walks around the block now to gradually increase my exercise, adding more time or speed or distance gradually. The goal being to start burning more calories then I take in. This is all part of the recovery after surgery, and the work to restore and improve health. I took a fast walk at noon, with storm clouds building to the west, and rumbles of rolling thunder off in the distance. It began to lightly rain just as I returned to my own front walk and unlocked my door.

Yesterday the sky was filled with dramatic cloudscapes. I grabbed the camera and went for a drive out into the farmfields. I got several good photographs of dramatic forms hovering over the tall green tassled corn, sometimes gaps of blue sky appearing through a tunnel of grey and white and steel blue grey. There were drops of rain on the windshield as I drove, from time to time, but it wasn't a heavy rain. Other moments the sky was layered greys and steels, darkly ominous anvils above and darker featureless clouds below, pregnant with rain. I wandered through the afternoon with the camera, stopping at times to frame an image. I drove back into town by back farm roads that no one but locals ever drive on, and stopped at the giant hardware and farm supply store. I stood in the parking lot making more photographs, then walked around the store for more exercise.

funnel of sky
past rolling pins and flights:
flash of heaven

Walking around the block one more time a half-hour before midnight, to walk off some energy. Feeling restless all evening, legs twitching with the desire to move, but feeling tired mostly. The sky half-filled with scudding clouds, thin peels covering the full moon then vaporizing. The moon blazing with silver radiance, light flooding the clouds that scud past it. On the eastern horizon, above the houses and trees, stacked thunderstorm clouds move off further east, their tops illuminated pale silver-blue by the full moon’s light. As I walk, they strobe and flicker with silent lightning from within. Layers and shapes revealed in flash what the moon's light made seem featureless.

midnight thunderheads
to the east lit by full moon:
lightning flash within

Notes towards an egoless poetry 15: Why I'm not submitting haiku to journals

Late night thoughts on why I'm not submitting haiku to journals lately:

• I find it hard to submit haiku to journals. It's something that seems to take a lot of effort, the submission process, for usually no reward. One could often say the same about poetry in general, of course. When it doesn't tax my patience, I do it. And it's not the most important thing in my life right now. It's not that I don't want to submit haiku, it's that it's not very high priority. My resources are curtailed right now. Writing is more important than submitting.

• I sometimes find it hard to take haiku publishing seriously. There are an awful lot of haiku journals out there. Even the best of them sometimes give you so much material that you don't have time to sit and savor each poem. You find yourself browsing among huge piles of haiku, not really getting anything more than a shallow draught of each one. It's not as if there was one great haiku journal, which would be essential reading, and a few lesser journals. There are in fact literally thousands of them. So much that no one could ever read, much less collate, them all. You could spend all your time writing haiku, submitting them, having them published, and still go completely unnoticed. The market, as it were, is seriously glutted.

• Everybody writes and writes and writes, but few actually read. It's as if the reason for living, for most poets, was self-expression, even if there's not much there to be expressed. The world of poetry often excludes the non-specialist reader nowadays, by either being too insular or hermetic, or by being too willing to lecture rather than listen. A rare encounter with a lover of poetry who isn't also a practicing poet is entirely refreshing. I remember one National Park Ranger in the Southwest who I met, on one of my photography roadtrips, who could quote long lines of poetry at me from several favorite poets; a true reader, an interested reader, an enthusiastic reader.

How many poets actually read poetry without a glimmer of competitiveness in the eye? How many haiku writers read and love haiku by total strangers, poets who are still alive, rather than the revered masters? How many haiku writers read many haiku that they didn't write themselves.

Poets give readings all the time: performance is an expectation, after all. But it's the rare poetry reading wherein a poet reads poems he or she didn't write. When it happens, it often awakens the drowsing audience, because the reading is infused with enthusiastic love. Are poetry readings meant to market poetry, or are they displays of ego, or are they moments of shared performance of things one loves?

• A lot of haiku I read lately are fairly shallow. They seem to be tossed off quickly—which is no bad thing in itself—and seem not to have been given a lot of gestation or contemplation. I am not a fan of extensive rewriting of haiku: if you can't get it right in a few tries, it's best to abandon the poem and try again from scratch. The spontaneity does matter; yet in the greatest haiku, it is the effortless effort of one-point attention that shines through. That is what makes them memorable, that spontaneity that takes much effort to master.

Shallow haiku by contrast are very forgettable. You read them once, and they evaporate. "Dew drops on a maple leaf." A haiku that could be a comment on haiku-writing. Haiku are perhaps not meant to be immortal—and they are rarely written from the pretentious expectation of immortality that suffuses much epic narrative poetry—yet there is something lacking when you forget a poem immediately. What did I just read? Even in those enormous haiku journals, you find yourself re-reading, because the poems didn't stick to your ribs.

• Topical, news-generated poems in haiku form are not actually haiku, but senryu. It's like the annoying American habit of calling flowers infused in hot water "herbal tea," when in fact there are no tea leaves whatsoever in the concoction. If what you're sipping doesn't actually have any leaves of the tea plant (Camellia sinensis) in it, don't call it tea. If your poem looks like a haiku, but contains none of the traditional elements and essences of haiku, perhaps it's best to not label it as a haiku. Of course, people can and will do whatever they want. But don't give me "herbal tea" and expect me to drink it as tea.

• I don't want to contribute noise rather than signal to this already glutted environment. I make haiku all the time, most often lately in response to my own photographs. It seems natural to respond to some photographs, or sequences of photographs, with short, imagistic poems—a task for which haiku are eminently suited as a form. I practice carefully the principal of avoiding a literal description of the photograph in the poem: I want each to illuminate the other, not merely caption.

This principal of illumination rather than simply restating the contents lies at the heart of haibun, as I understand the form. I have in fact had several haibun published over the years in various rather prestigious journals devoted to the form; but again, haven't submitted anything of late. (In one case, editorial personal politics seems to be an insurmountable issue.)

Haibun can be described as sections of dense, poetic prose, followed by or interspersed with haiku. The haiku reflects upon the subject contents of the prose surrounding it, but from a fresh angle, without simply repeating what the prose has already presented. You look at the room in a new light. You comment on the historical moment just narrated. You see the night sky with new eyes, the scales removed.

When I write haiku to my photographs, my goal is make it seem as though either the image or the poem might have come first. Or that they arose at the same moment, indistinguishably. They illuminate each other, and hopefully merge into one presentation, indivisible. I don't want the poem to simply comment on the image; I don't want the image to simply illustrate the poem. I want that sideways thinking that can arise when you look at a moment, or an archetype, from several directions simultaneously. Relativity: the observer's position changes the perception of what is observed. Indeterminacy: by observing some moment from more than one angle, it becomes more nuanced, more complex, less fixed, less certain of itself.

• In the current world of poetry, in which everyone calls themselves poets who can manage to put two words together in sequence, overstimulation is the rule, rather than contemplation. I would not add more noise. I would prefer to evoke more silence.

So I am generally content to be a haiku-monk in my hermitage, making the poems I make, sharing some of them with those who might find them interesting, and presenting others to the world in general with no expectations that anyone is listening. I think of Thomas Merton in his hermitage, making pen drawings, writing poems, certain that Someone was listening, not caring otherwise, evoking a deep inner silence in everything he made. You could do far worse for a role model of having a proper attitude towards making your art.

When I encounter a genuine haiku, it seems to me to be a poem of contemplation. Not merely insight, not merely observation; rather, deep contemplation. The silence behind all great poetry rises up through the poem, like a deep crystal well of sweet spring water; to get at the water itself, all you have to do is break through the crust of ice covering it, which is the poem itself. Genuine haiku have that feeling of depth, of resonance, of life-force power.

That sense of depth is something I often miss when reading many contemporary haiku, which often seem to be just short-form versions of the usual self-regarding post-confessional lyric. Many haiku are not actually haiku, but personal observations. The goal is to make the self disappear into the poem, not be reinforced thereby. Haiku is unique in contemporary poetry in that it craves egolessness. Not more personality in the poem, but less. If you can't find the poet in the poem, except perhaps as an evaporating trace of humor as in the case of Issa, congratulations.

Contemporary poetry suffers from too much ego as it is, even in those genres which claim to remove the author from dictating meaning. The "absence of the author" in some cases serves only to reinforce authorial direction, which in some cases leaves the reader out of the loop, struggling to understand just what's going on. Paradoxically, the poem becomes even more about the author, rather than less.

Even the haiku journals suffer from this. Lots of newly-minted haiku don't get past this egotism, or transcend it, to enter that crystalline space in which pure sensation is bell ringing in an empty sky. We ought to be able to look into the mirror of haiku, and see that the mirror is empty: even this form is illusory. Form is just the ladder we climb to reach the mountaintop. Kicking the ladder away is that last act of liberation.

So I suppose, in some poets' minds, I am demanding that haiku be part of some universe of pure perception, pure appreciation, pure sensation, mindless and absolute. Like the Platonic world of pure forms. They suppose wrongly: it's not the universe of pure forms I think haiku is path towards entering, it's the emptiness of no-form, no-thing, no-self.

No-one.

• Westerners often misunderstand Buddhism in this same way, because they cannot stop getting hung up on the construction of ego, rather than its dissolution. Talk to them about neurosis, and they get it in an instant; talk to them about egolessness, and you get blank stares. You can read endless books by Americans who have converted to Buddhism and see this again and again: the rehearsal of ego, the depiction of neurosis and its concomitant rehearsal of generated suffering. Endless chapters about personal failure, all of it illusory in the end. (Why do so many American Jews convert to Buddhism? An interesting history in itself, perhaps.)

I despair sometimes of explaining this inexplicable truth, which can be experienced in silence but not easily described in words. Haiku comes closer to encapsulating it than most other poetic forms. Yet most haiku we see published in all these journals do not capture the silence at the end of practice—for poetry, as Basho said, is after all, a Way—but rather tend to rehearse the formulae of practice without capturing its essence.

If I could make that one pure haiku, in which the silence, the cool crystal waters, the egoless void, were all contained, I might still not submit it for publication, knowing full well it would be lost in the general noise. But one keeps practicing haiku as a Way, making effortless effort to achieve that pure poetry. These are drops of clean water one lets fall into into the pond, which gradually will displace and cleanse the muddy water. A few drops at a time, over a long time, will replace the muddy water from even the most turbulently clouded of ponds.

And so it is with the mind, as well as the poem.

• I am aware that my criticisms here are nothing new; if anything, they're an eternal recurrence of some of the same criticisms Basho made of poetry in his own time and place. I merely restate them in my own words, metaphors, and analogies, as both reaffirmation, and as meditation on original principals.

After all, making the haiku is a Way, while submitting the haiku to a journal may be a detour. Not an invalid detour, not a wrong road, just a detour, no more than a side-bar, a distraction if not actually a pitfall. I would never say: Do not submit your poems. (Although I would say, do not submit your uncontemplated and unfinished poems.) I would never counsel any haiku writer to keep their work to themselves: withdrawal from the fray is just another flavor of vanity, after all, and thus is as bound up with ego as is self-marketing. You cannot transcend the ego by pretending to ignore it.

I would, however, say: Use the discretion learned from practicing the Way of Poetry, or the way of haiku, to guide you through the fray. Remember the lessons of silence, of humility, and of being the one-point observer who takes it all in without need to comment or judge. Practice non-attachment from outcomes. Practice letting the poem itself arise from silence in its own way and time. Let your discipline be one of attentive listening, and let others who would be life's loudspeakers do so.

•

Earlier essays in this series:

Notes towards an egoless poetry 1: Visibility of the persona

Notes towards an egoless poetry 2: Practical matters

Notes towards an egoless poetry 3: the hermit hut

Notes towards an egoless poetry 4: the removal of the "I"

Notes towards an egoless poetry 5: the paradox of removal

Notes towards an egoless poetry 6: Showing versus telling

Notes towards an egoless poetry 7: Some quotes

Notes towards an egoless poetry 8: Art or Botany?

Notes towards an egoless poetry 9: Mental Illness & Poetry

Notes towards an egoless poetry 10: first person stranger

Notes towards an egoless poetry 11: Kenosis

Notes towards an egoless poetry 12: Changes

Notes towards an egoless poetry 13: Something Other

Notes towards an egoless poetry 14: Nondual Awareness

deer, woods, dusk

deer, woods, dusk

In the indigoed light, it’s snowing again, thick mists fogging the distant treetops. Flakes begin to stick to the wet ground, which was covered with water and sleet, and will soon, in the chill evening, be covered with ice and snow.

deer move in the woods,
stepping high, noses down—
snow falling hard, now

The watershed deer herd were mincing through the woods to the south of the house, exposed by the lack of leaves on the trees, the air dark blue with evening. One doe started to move into the yard. I picked up my laser pointer, and put the red dot on the crumbled snow at the her feet, and much to my pleased surprise, she nosed at it, the way a cat or dog will do. I moved the dot around a few times, and the doe followed closely, then I moved the dot off into the woods, and the deer bounded away. Who knew? I guess I’ve discovered a new way to herd winter deer.

ruminant hooves pace
silent among fallen oak:
winter tree-spirits

•

Start with a poem. Then we make iterations of the poem, gradually working towards words-as-art, or visual poetry. At what point does the poem's linguistic information stop being comprehensible? At what point do we reach the frontier between (verbal) meaning and (visual) meaning. At what point does the art cease being an illustration, and become integral? When do the words become an integral element of the art? One element among others, which can be parsed for verbal meaning, in gestalt, but is also part of the greater gestalt (in which the verbal meaning might be nested) of visual/poetry.







At some point all the elements must synergize into something archetypal, symbolic, mythopoetic: the goal and result of much of my creative work. At some point the elements must become more than what they individually are, to take on a numinous, liminal life of their own; to become shamanic; to become an experience of threshold. This has long been known to me, as the artist, as the goal of much of my art-making: to depict and recreate, visually, aurally, even verbally, experiences of the threshold and the liminal, that I have myself experienced, and which I have no better way to re-create for others to witness.

•

In the past, I've treated words this same, as an element of composition, in experimental musical settings. I've made several text-sound pieces on tape (and later digitally) using layered readings of my poetry, and cyclic loops of texts that are a form of gradual-process music. For example: Light, in which the words finally become part of a multi-layered texture that has musical shape and form: the words as elements of composed music, rather than purely linguistic conveyors. At what point does the (verbal) meaning go away, and the sound of the speaking voice become a musical texture?

Using word-clouds as an element in a visual composition is equivalent, I think, to using spoken words as an element of musical composition. There is still (verbal) meaning to be found on the small, fractal scale: individual words and phrases come to the foreground of attention. But, hopefully, the overall effect is gestalt and non-linear, rather like non-verbal cinema. The (verbal) meaning of the words is not as important as the textures created with them; although there are meanings to be found (assembled, perceived, created) therein, the meanings are additive; right-brain-perceived as a gestalt, rather than left-brain linear-logical. A lot of this is about liberating poetry from the straight-jacket of fixed meaning—not of meaning itself, since the idea of "liberating" words from meaning entirely is absurd, as words will always be signifiers for memory, experience, and conception; but rather, of liberating words from assumed fixed positions of meaning. To soften the edges of hard linear logical, rational discourse. To make poetry from language that all-too-often is wielded as a blunt instrument of deterministic meaning, and by softening that bluntness, to allow a bit of Mystery to creep in. Which is what poetry is all about: making words do more with less; making words invest themselves with meaning beyond the ordinary; with opening the doors and windows for Mystery to seep in, if it will.

•

And all of this because deer have been continuously and forcefully coming into my perception, in various recurrent and forceful ways, for the past several weeks. When ghost-deer walk into your mind, sit down in the grass and listen to what they have to say. When you find a perfect antler discarded on the lawn right under the window where you do most of your writing, pay attention. When deer emerge from the fog and blowing snow and darkness, every dusk of every day for a long week of driving, listen to what they're pointing you towards.

And then respond by making art about the encounters. Because poetry and art and music are praise: are celebration, and commemoration: are the journal and notes made from encounters with the liminal, on the threshold, and you had best pay attention, or ignore them at your peril.

Snow Pilgrim

Snow drives in around the porch edges. Puffs of whitegrained breath, fallen on uninsulated floors, to drift. The local definition of a blizzard asks how horizontal the snow falls. Green and white the red cardinal's shelter. Gray squirrel, puff-cheeked, clutches the topmost spruce bough, bouncing in the wind, to reach the tree's last cones. Rabbit tracks dash lines between trees.

a quiet rest
in between mountain hikes,
the trailman's lodge



Seeking a festival more quiet, more contemplative, the old poet ties up his knapsack, goes out into the snow, boots laced high over wool, hat and mittens braced upwind. Any direction as good, in this whiteout. Where the road shelfs over the cutbank of river's loop, he stops to watch heavy flakes streak through whipping blackoak branches across the oxbow slope. Memorizing calligraphy of lines of trees clouded behind snow, because too cold for inkstone and brush. Flakes tick on already frozen drifts, winds hiss the boughs, somewhere off upstream a bluejay shrieks. All other silences converge. Walking stick and knapsack, uproad, vanishing. Fade to white.

line of footfalls lost
under fresh fallen snow,
no one left to see

the coming and going of the light

at Big Sur, California, August 2008







Sunset at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, Big Sur, CA. The thin ribbon of waterfall falling to the beach, in its circular cove, the northern slope covered with pink day-lilies the locals call "naked ladies." A pair of deep blue Stellar's jays work through the lilies, while the sun settles into a pool of gold far out over the ocean, on this cold and cloudless evening.

calm ocean mirror
reflects the setting sun—
the sickle moon





•

this is the festival of the changing of the light

at the window, the child looks out
at inward dusk, quiet, fading;
from the shoulders of the man
standing on the hillcrest, wings unfurl,
and spread to cover the sky;
the moon glows white
above red smoke sunset clouds,
a button on a crimson sash—

somewhere else, not here,
the moon’s full: a surfer finds his wave
under her fulfilling light,
phosphorescent water nipping anklets
till with board he disappears
under the foaming curl—

another moon, else, greening,
tangible shoulders of the stag
under cedars, head raised to sample
the air for food, shelter, mate,
eyes indistinguishable from shadows,
a heart the shape of muscular rope—

and the light keeps altering,
moon by moon each minute,
seen in the world’s changing,
an altar of violet shadows, each

Morning Glory

Out in the garden in the high heat of the day, trimming and weeding. One of the morning-glories has started to bloom. At last the recovery of color in the green, greening, brown of time. Purple-red trumpets sexual at the ends of whirling vines. Yesterday more cold, gloomy, wet, rainy weather. The coldest, darkest, wettest July of record. Has summer actually begun now, or is it still an illusion. Be prepared for cold nights, no matter where or when. The trumpet flowers say, heat, heat us, oh the sun, oh bright sun, we love rising and opening, we open to you, rise, open, rise, open, wind, fall, return. Bees everywhere, our lovers. What are these iridescent scarabs lurking in the goldenrod. How we open, rise, and open, even to them. Our vanity is perilous, but lovely. Glory is a vine climbing towards the light, the light, towards sun, god, light, and high frail skies. We trail. We trail ourselves along your grasp. Available windows. A spout of rain. We rise, open, rise.

and in the midst
of roses, another rose:
bees, be not afraid

Cuyahoga

images from Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio









blood iron stone ore
seeping from precipiced shale slabs:
the bleeding falls









Everywhere I travel, moving east and north, spring remains the same: the trees and bushes just beginning to leaf out, buds still tight, small, red-green. The flowering crabapples, magnolias, and forsythia a riot of primary colors that spotlight an otherwise late-winter-drab brown land. As I move, the line of green returning with spring moves with me: we race each other towards summer.

tentative, unsure
if it really wants to, the leaf
emerges from its bud

Wyeth at Kuerners

A certain sense and smell of snow and earth mixed together in the air when the old farmer stomped in. Brushstrokes of brown, calligraphic slashes on the white snowfield of the paper, the stark line of a hill punctuated by a coated walked and a heeling dog. No one who hasn't lived on farms knows that smell, freshness and rot conjoined. It's even in the walls of the old house. Where a hook hangs from the ceiling, a few woman's hairs dangling from its lip. All violence is inner this cold morning; but never far away. Pages thrown into old drawers, lines leaping. Hitching pants up to cross over the fallen stone fence. Slash of trees, the eye catches, stops, resists, lingers, loves. It's not a grid, don't see it like that. There aren't any straight lines in nature; but that fence, the barn, the house looking low from the hillside, tall from the meadow, all perspective and separation. People see what they want to see, that's all. Something hard behind warm eyes, in the white room above the sundrunk summer lawn, just as white, whiter, crisper, with the mud tracks of winter trudge and tailing. Over back of the fenceline, angle of hill, just so. A thousand pines filled with sparrows. That was a good dog.

the boy returns
to the hills he wandered—
the first snowdrop

Columbia River

from the mouth of the Columbia River, at the Pacific Ocean





Traveling across the back of the high pine crested coastal range. Out of the rain and fog into brief stabs of sun under the tall forest. Lonely two lane road. I've driven so long I don't want to be driving again today; I'm tired, my body aches from sitting but working; but there's no other option. To see the ocean one last time before heading inland, back into the mountains, towards the prairies and home, you have to go out and come back.

bright sky, high winds,
brown pelicans over the waves—
gloom only inside



earth backbone spine
cresting and to brush against wave—
broken ribs, breathing





weathered cavities
in driftwood, wet with promise—
windows on a world

Travel Haiku

Various haiku and haiku-like poems from the road trip, more or less in chronological order. Some of these work better in classical Chinese four-line forms, perhaps. And I am still writing some haibun around the haiku. These are not necessarily finished pieces, but a work-in-progress towards a longer haibun travel journal. No doubt rewrites will occur. I present these as a sample, a log, a foretaste.

I thought of how many times Basho revised Oku no hosomichi, and I thought of how it might be interesting to present a piece at various stages in its development, for comparison's sake.

•

Camped at 10,000 feet above sea level, Wheeler Peak in the near distance above the campground. Great Basin National Park, Nevada. Other people in other parts of the campground, but far enough away that I feel alone here, under the stars and the wind. Planes going by overhead are low enough to see and hear. Across the basin 7000 feet below, I can see Notch Peak in Utah, which I saw from the other side as I began my day's drive.

moon, stars, aspen, pines,
the mountain peering over my shoulder:
silent companions

•

Dayton State Park, Nevada. A little pocket park by the Carson River, five minutes from the small downtown, but still feels isolated and in the countryside. A covey of quail ran away from my tires when I pulled in. Out in the darkness, coyotes are mocking an anxious, frenzied barking dog.

sleeping under stars
even filtered by city lights
is healing medicine

Bats circled overhead at dust. My feet puffed up the dust by the sagebrush. The fire keeps away the dark, primitive fears.

one last look at the stars
before settling in for the night—
a satellite, a shooting star:
benediction

Driving into the dry playa salt-pan basin region of northwestern Nevada, the harsh land is sometimes leavened by surprising emerald strips of growth, like putting a lawn on the moon. East of the road, a thin lake lies between flat-topped mountains, absolutely mirror-still.

mesa stretches out
its own dry lake
to reflect in

•

Sunset at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, Big Sur, CA. The thin ribbon of waterfall falling to the beach, in its circular cove, the northern slope covered with pink day-lilies the locals call "naked ladies." A pair of deep blue Stellar's jays work through the lilies, while the sun settles into a pool of gold far out over the ocean, on this cold and cloudless evening.

calm ocean mirror
reflects the setting sun—
the sickle moon

•

Morning after camping at Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park:

crows caw in the trees
around my resting place—
morning alarms

•

At the Monterey Bay Aquarium:

pale white drifters
pulse slowly, tendrils floating—
moons in the sea

sea of tentacles
blue, orange, white on the seabed:
mouths to feed, children

the hammerhead shark
cruises close by the tank window,
turns to show his teeth

What Remains (2)

Trunks of old photos. An 1837 family Bible, births and deaths recorded of unknown and numberless dead. How my ancestors came to marry one another. Memory books of travels feinting towards the exotic, in a great-grandmother's hand. The building of the old church. Ancient flickers between leaves, a moment's whiff of October, dried and dessicating papyrus. Baby clothing never used.

turned to the wall,
a pillar of old scrapbooks—
landslide of memory

A place in the sun unlike any other. Nothing there but white light on white floors and walls. Glowing from under eaves. Sun's lines on walls moving as the day moves. Strips of light, shadow, what lies between. Frames of windows open passages into the light. Through portals the movement and scent of oceans.

sunstruck stone and sea:
strands of kelp across tidepools
radiate sunglint shards

Shelter: oven, closet, broom, stove. Places where the old lines of furniture now gone are left embossed in carpets, outlined in dirt and dust. Wall now clean, now empty. Marks where nails were, and lines around hung frames, vanished. Fresh coats of paint. Roof of thatch or woodnail and tin. Rains from above and below. Trying to convince flood or famine to stay outside.

stone sea and sky
build up a new home—
till the world fails

What Disappears

Found at the edge of ocean's rim, in sands, under cloud-shrouded moon, full at its rising, its soaring and sinking. Found under streamered banks of thunderheads backlit at dusk. Found at the foot of memorial sculptures soaring and disappearing into humid skies. Found at day's end, night's loom, a scatter of gulls swallowed by the sea, by the sky. Found where there is no more time for daybreak waiting. Found here at the end of roads. Found further down the coast, where land tapers and dissolves into ocean, into nothing. Found there where a pile of clothes dogears a trail of footprints that lead into surf and disappear.

intimate sunlight
corners this room's white walls—
empty at oceanside

Living in the Camper, Arroyo Hondo, NM

Small trailer barely towed here over mountain passes that made the truck chuff down to a bare crawl. Was going to camp in Taos Canyon, but there was no room for it, no place. Here, on the mesa under remnant volcanic cinder cones, west of everything known, some hundred yards behind the nearest cabin, electricity on a long thin wire, and a place for the truck to park. My life reduced to 13 by 7 rounded feet, a mere step off the ground, creaky floor, a door that has to be jimmied into secure position each bedtime, mouseholes, migrating tarantulas, coyotes yipping on the mesa nearby when I get out to pee in the middle of the night and look at the stars, a pair of nesting bluebirds, a pair of nesting ravens, three nights with a great horned owl on a post right above me, wrens tick-tacking on the trailer roof every dawn, me still curled in my nest of wool blankets beneath their scurries.

living with skin off—
camp under the volcano
so near to the birds



I drive the ten or so miles into Taos many afternoons, where there's an internet cafe, where over the months I will become a regular and get to know all the employees and other regulars. Nothing to do in life but sit there and write for hours a day. I get the occasional freelance. I give some money away, I learn to eat only organically-grown food. I volunteer at the Taos farmer's market, and am paid in piles of fresh vegetables. At one point, I have to move my entire website to a new home, an architectural fiction that revises its own dreams of stardom. My phone only works some of the time. The weeks tick by with intensifying slowness. There are nights when I'm so alone.

how far to go
for the sound of human words!
these silent evenings



Still, the world closes down to a rough and static microcosm: nowhere to go, nothing to do, despite all efforts. All alone here, no real friends to speak of, the old life abandoned far behind. So the walls of endurance reduce themselves to these fiberglass camper curves. The fabric art my sister made for my journey, hung near the door: "the arrow of desire." A daily routine of bread and cheese. Soupy chicken and rice broth on alternate dusks. I eat clean food, and feel my strength return. Yet everything foul rises up in me. What caused this rage, this violent frustration? Hates long gone, wounds brought near. There's nothing here but silence and moving stars, and time to set the broken bones of a life gone stagnant and derailed. Now, the pressure-cooker begins to boil, and you blast and bleat and bluff against the silence, learning how to die with grace, to be reborn with something kenning commitment. The rocks witness and absorb your inner deserts; the sky takes up the story, when you've shouted your tears into the blankets; the mesquite, low-stooped and carnivorous, scratch and scrape you raw when you hug them for comfort, embracing you while unsealing scabs to the healthy air and light.

cleaning house, I spit
my poisons on rough ground,
learn to live again



It gets darker before it gets better. I write things I'd never say to anyone, ancient vitriol and volcanic railings flung into the sun. One day, I find my apples have rotted in their cupboard. I stand outside, having had enough, and put all my violence into each rotting fruit before I fling it away, as far across the mesa as I can throw. They shatter and splinter on the rocks far away, and my fears and angers are absorbed into the sage and cedar, cleansed, while striped Western ground squirrels devour the dessicated remnants of a tree's fruit borne far away, brought here, and shattered near their burrows.

how silent it is
after the storm has passed—
no grass-blade sways, still



One early morning, snow on the shell, at first sounding like wren's feet: but there is no chatter or bird-shout. All that cold day, cocooned in blankets, writing, hands cold, drinking endless cups of tea brewed on the miniature range. Ice on the floorboards. If I drive down the precipitous mountain, will I be able to get back home tonight? The snow fades after noon, leaving behind presentiments of wintermind.

wintering over
birds, voles and coyotes as my
only companions



I am trapped. Nothing moves. The frost breathes, the trees vent evaporites into a sky so low, here, you reach up and grab cloud. No more mountaintops, just lines of ice along their flanks. Tracks of ravens in the snow outside. The rough dismantling of a dormant life, awakening. I have to leave, I can't survive the cold in the camper, even with a borrowed electric heater. Indifferent mountains watching, we scurry to build our nests.

enough of shelter!
I take up my knapsack for
the refuge of the roads



We get the trailer down the cliff road, somehow, and I depart for California, abandoning mountain winters, fully-loaded and my head full of roads, thinking I will winter over by the sea, then return in mountain summer. Suddenly, the trailer hitch bounces free, the camper's safety chains rend and clear, there's a colossal bang as the trailer read-ends the truck, then, as i watch in the rear-view mirror, my home sails into the air above the Rio Grande canyon, a home aloft, and comes crashing to a halt below, wedged in by a big boulder, crushed, husked, splintered, torn, trashed, cracked open, a walnut shell split by the fingers of an indifferent god.

what need do I have
of shards scattered in my wake?
silent mountains breathe

It could have been so much worse. It could have veered the other direction, into traffic, and shelled itself around an oncoming family SUV. I salvage some of what I have lived with, these many months; blankets, tools, small unbroken things. But the camper itself is ruined, and the last of my money goes to tow it up the cliff and onto a nearby field. I take the license plate with me, and leave the rest. My autumnal home, now crushed and desolate. The gods had given me a place to live, now taken away again. I travel light, I no longer need it, the turtle has shed its shell.

over a year now
since the fall that shed my goals—
still, trembling in dreams

winter midwinter midlife life (a multimedia haibun)

Cold light over snow. Through bare trees, through tall windows, the neighbor's Christmas tree a constellation of white stars, a conical firmanent, a universe of light-cones. The camera fits onto the tripod as though eager to be hinged and loaded. Boots climb over ankles hungrily. The long wool coat, the hat and scarf, the finger-gloves: every instinct is to be outside, in the enveloping night. 'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the fields, not a creature was stirring, except chickadees and mad photographers.

full moon rising
over bright-lit Christmas homes—
silence of solstice

A frozen land, a cold world, a small island of humanity; their winter festival, a time of fasting and of feasting; the traditional meal, two seed-cakes, like small tan potato pancakes, each with three ovoid seeds cooked in, placed equidistantly around the center; the young man leader offers them to me, a traveler, on a beautiful black ceramic plate. I start awake from my nap as logs crack in the fireplace.

vivid blue pencils
limn night-blue tree branches—
emergent moon

That night, that day, the Sacred Heart, long my burden of compassion and passion, once lodged in my breast those long months in the desert, those nights by the waters, awakened in me all unwilling, all unprepared and unexpected, covered with thorns, blood-red and scourged. The Sacred Heart came clearly to my mind’s eye, that afternoon, that evening, complete with thorns and wounds and blessing. Do I need to still be bleeding? I made the thorns go away three times, but they kept coming back. So I turned them into green, living ivy. And then the wounds closed and scarred over, and the bleeding ceased. The result was a green-man Sacred Heart, with green aqua light everywhere, quiesecent, calm, at rest. I left it as a closed wound in my chest, no longer an open one, blue, green, like growing plants, the color of water reflecting twilight through cedars.

under fresh snow
white flowers bloom anyway—
the days passing

even the Buddha once asked,
what is a natural death?

•

This is an experiment in pulling more avenues of bandwidth into poetry. Short of making an actual video, this was an experiment to pull in all the aspects of audio/video while still working within the constraints of the static medium that is HTML. (It's often worthwhile to work within limits to see what you can do, given those limits.)

Elsewhere, I have been experimenting with moving lines of text, recited poetry, sound design, and music combined into DVD and HD videos that use both my still photography and videography into overall combined media. I like multi-channel, multi-window presentation. I can track multiple windows of content, and I like the effects on the self that have multiple centers of focus in a video presentation can do for the viewer/reader. (Hence my appreciation for "experimental" filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway, in such films as The Pillow Book.)

I have long had a vision of performing my music and poetry live in a meditative chapel-like space while behind and around the musicians both still and moving imagery was projected larger than life—like stained glass windows—with never less than two images up at any one time. An illumination space. Certainly using my Spiral Dance series as some of hte projected images.

This exploded or expanded haibun, if you will, uses the limits imposed by hypertext links as a strength instead of a weakness, I hope. The links create new windows, rather than making you go back and forth between. So you get a supplemental and parallel media window opening without losing, hopefully, the thread of the poem. Of course, one can also read it as just a poem, too, and ignore the links.

So far, I like the results. However, per usual I have also already received brickbats from more purist poets who either don't get what it's intended to do, or reject it out of hand, or simply don't know what to do with it. "That other stuff distracts me from the poem, and therefore takes away from the poem rather than adding to it!" That sort of comment.

I have never been a purist. I've never even been a purist about artforms. I've always been a huge fan of Laurie Anderson and her individual style(s) of performance art, which incorporated several channels of presentation—music, spoken word, physical movement, film, ambient micing techniques, stage lighting effects, recorded playback accompanying live performance, etc.—into an overall artistic, aesthetic experience. Seeing her perform live has always been inspirational; at the same time, her videos and other cross-media experiments have also always given me ideas, and opened up new possibilities.

•

Addendum:

The most curtly dismissive comment by a purist poet received so far has been: I'm unconvinced that good writing needs auditory support. Well of course good writing doesn't need "auditory support," but if it's good writing then it doesn't matter if the audio is there or not, or the visuals. So if they are, so what?

One wonders if this is one of those same poets who claim that Bob Dylan is a great poet, period, rather than a great singer-songwriter. Poets tends to divorce the words from the music in most cases; and wrongly so. A great well-crafted song uses both words and music, and synergizes into an indivisible whole. You can't really separate them out.

One can only marvel at such tunnel vision. Of course, most of these opinionated poets have never heard of Derek Jarman's last film, Blue, either.

Ultimately, this criticism misses the point entirely, which is: It's not a poem, it's a multi-channel multimedia poem, or text-sound poetry, multi-sensory artwork, or hypertext. The whole point is to expand, or explode, the notion that poetry must only ever be just words. To explode the notion of what a poem is. To play outside the boxes of form and genre and medium, and to demolish the expectations of stereotype.

enduring, a day and night pass

This is a substantial revision of this poem, the haibun sequence that originally had the working title Thanksgiving Day and Night. This is three or four revisions later.

In the interest of following up on the idea of showing the revision process by example, I thought I'd re-post the poem, here, in a later state. It might still be a work in progress, but it feels much more "complete" to me at this time, and ready to be "abandoned," as I move on to other projects.

I believe it was the French poet Paul Valery who said, A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

I've always found that to be true.

•

enduring, a day and night pass

time lost to visions
overlaying the world with
interlocking wheels

Time falls around my ankles, a discarded robe before one steps into the bath, warmed by living flesh, soon to chill. Whole days wash off, slosh down the drain. A week suddenly gone, and nothing happened: or, everything happened, and you could not record it all. The recording angel naps those days when acedia rises in the east, the bloody and demanding sun. Red sky at night, sailor's delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning. I'm going to wash these blues right out of my hair.

Snow late last night, coating the gray world white. I watched it fall in that perfect silence that new snowfall brings to the world, as blessing. Juncos, round slate-blue birds, come this morning to sit on the deck railings, kicking up tufts as they land and take off again. The live-in cardinal couple is brilliant against the white land, the male a moving cursor of laser-dot red against a black and white background. The chokecherry tree will still produce its small sable berries, come January. The birds will gather in its branches, gorging themselves, stooping down to pick through the snow under the tree for more fallen fruit.

Already melting. The sun comes out, fitfully, streaks of blue between the clouds. A few more light flakes, here and there, particles of bleached air-borne ash. I worry when I can’t find my gratitudes, even a poor and starving minimal thanks for being still alive—that temporary and contingent existence universally culminated in a face-on meeting with entropy.

If the only prayer
you ever said was "Thank you"—
that would suffice.
(Meister Eckhart)

More lost time: Driving home after dinner in another town, the clouds thin and crumpled, a near-full moon hangs high over white corn rows, blue shadows on the land. I think to myself, When did you get to be full again, moon? Then I realized, I hadn’t seen it for weeks, between illness and exhaustion, and all the cloudy weather. Suddenly the moon's eye was almost round again, silver behind mottled veils.

moon and starlight
on snow-draped fields near town:
black winter berries

I sit awhile at midnight, in the armchair with my heaviest quilt draped over, staring at the fire burning in the fireplace, no lights on, waiting. Outside a silver light; a few stars peek through bare trees. The cold clear night both dark and light. The room is silent except for the sounds of the fire. Approaching silence within. Nothing moves but the flames. The black lines of treeshadows on the white snow are arteries, rivers, tunnels between now and some deeper place.

snowlight firelight moonlight
candelight sunlight night that made us—
receive us all at the end

Lost time. No stories before bedtime, collapsing breath into narrative. Nothing is more unreal than the self-talk that claims to be real. An unstill mind cannot hear the silences rising up, to break into song.

Let go, and go back to sitting and staring at the flames, while out of the corner of the eye, stars and treeshadows slowly turn the wheel of the sky’s clock, winding up, winding down. And the return to silence durable, inevitable, unexpected, tremulous, inexplicable. Light wheels through the fireplace screen, makes shadow patterns on the ceiling, splashes on floors and walls of the silent house.

unnamed falls
to frozen lakes—
silent water sleep

Driving Across the Basin & Range

Photographs trigger memories of where and when I took the photo. I sometimes go back through the photos taken on a journey, and write from them, making a new narrative of the same road trip. Images bring back memories, even of small things like a bumper sticker seen on back of a beat-up pickup truck, and the memories turn into written impressions.

Poetic journal writing, like writing from photographs, is open-ended. The genre itself celebrates impermanence and flux, outlinging by example that daily life is not rigorously formed, with an Aristotlean beginning, middle, and end. Rather, moments each melt into the next, and you don't end a poem with a big conclusion, you just stop writing. The poem ends when you can't see to write anymore, after dark. It's low-technology, but that just makes it more portable.

Writing begins in observation, like photography. It can continue towards becoming a sketch form, like a plein aire painter; but also like photography. You can polish it later, like a sculpture made of stone or wood. But it all begins in observation.



The haibun sequence below is one I wrote on the hoof, as it were, but also added to and revised for a year after the actual experience. (Basho revised Oku no hosomichi carefully, once he was back from his long journey, to make it a better work of art, and less purely a journal.) Sometimes the words take awhole to percolate through the sediment before they come out, as a stream. Looking back over photographs of that road trip—that one day in which I drove for more than 9 continuous hours, driving up one range and down again, 3000 feet up, 2000 down, 2000 up, 4000 down, till by the day's end my ears ached from all the pressure changes; I began the day in western Utah, and ended it in San Francisco, having driven all the way across Nevada on Hwy. 50 to where it joins the interstate at Reno—added layers to the imagery, and memories were brought out by viewing the photos. Sketching is another way to evoke more layers, and add to a piece.

All of the photos I've mixed in here were taken on that long day's drive. The vast majority of them were taken from the truck, out the lowered window or right through the windshield, without slowing down or stopping: high-speed grab-shots, adding up to a record of changes.

Presenting it this way, as photos and poetry together, changes the way it's perceived. When I first presented it, as just poetry, it became quickly obvious that a lot of readers thought I was making things up, when all I was doing was recording observations. They had never seen this kind of land, not even in their dreams. While obersvational writing does require imagination, at the very least to find the words and metaphors necessary to convey the mood of the place, it's astonishing how often people forget that the universe is wilder and stranger than anything we can imagine. Ignorance tends to see wildness as fiction, when in fact it's all there to be seen by anyone passing through.

•

driving across the Basin & Range (haibun)

A black pickup truck in an open landscape. Somewhere in western Utah, on Highway 50, at the edge of the last Mormon-named farming towns, that last sign that says, “Next Service 124 Miles,” and you make a quick prayer to Somebody that you have enough gas in the tank, the water jugs are filled, the radiator doesn’t leak, all the engine fluids are topped up, spare jar of oil in the toolkit in back, and you floor it, leaning into the acceleration, as the asphalt streams out before you, flat and level and straight as an engineer could make it, a geodesic across the desert, spinning out, spinning off, across the moving rim of the horizon, into a vessel of grey light.

daring scimitar
of lone driver, lone drive—
bullet-hole memory



All these bowls have old names. Off to the south-east, under clouded-over skies, a mirror of flat alkaline lake; none of these lakes go anywhere, they’re all low-terrain catchments, so the rains wash mineralized salts from the hills, and the only way the water can leave is to evaporate, leaving behind crusted salts and desert varnish. So toxic, so salted, they’d kill you, or your engine, just as quick. The road is silent, but for the sound of wheels. You take your hands off the wheel, and let the truck drift smoothly onto the yellow line, straddling the dashes, aimed at the long distances that never seem to get closer.

drink where salmon
have never returned—
sweet wine of sweat

You stop, every so often, to take a photo, and to get out to stretch your legs, and pee. You have to stop: the rhythm demands it, in words no one has ever said. The photos come out bland and lifeless: empty shots of nothing, no sense of scale, grey fields with thin dark lines across them; it’s all flat and too distant to give any sense of dimension. You'd need to drop a skyscraper into the drowning pan, to give it perspective. Even then, it would just melt into the Big Empty, reflecting in the salt mirrors as it dissolved.

this melting fog
in a sheath of open sky—
unspoken rains



You pull over, after hours of nothing moving anywhere, in the middle of nowhere, and just at that moment, a car zips by going the other way: the only car you've seen in an hour. Isolated cars single free ions in a sea of vacuum; too few to make a decent probability wave. Suddenly, a call overhead, a flap of hawk wing. What’s there to catch out here, brother wind? A lonesome jumping mouse? Surely nothing that doesn’t taste of salt and sweat and endless silence.

getting out of the truck,
stopped in your tracks by sky—
birds fly up forever



At each summit, rain or clouds so low to the road you can stretch out your hands and grasp veils of fog. Or snow, in the higher passes. Slot canyons the river-carved roads up the sides of each range, then the sleety summit with robot weather stations white sentinels by the roadside, maybe a picnic area where slick tables huddle and shiver. The further west you drive, the colder towards night it gets, and nowhere to camp. Tall wind-shaped bonsai pines curve out from the rocks, in the wind's lee. Another hawk, another field being watched for voles. Then you come out over the vista over yet another long, low basin, each more desolate than the last, your ears aching for respite, and at last, for the touch of a hand.

circle of pines
veiled by blowing snow—
eyes of the earth



When you stop to listen to the wind, there is only the distance. The long silence between outbreath and inbreath, ritual pause, as whole worlds fade away then come into being again. This lowering sky. Long ago there were other voices here; the rocks, embedded with ancient seas and other low skies, remember them. You'd have to take your hammer and chip the outcrop just so, at this oblique angle, to find the polished strata where the vibrations are buried, fossil tracks in ripple marks of a shallow-duned sea that sank long ago into the dreams of snails.

scratching to get out,
light-taloned feet of old birds—
fresh rain ringing stones

Thanksgiving Day and Night

In the interest of demonstrating some aspects of the creative process, and using my own writing as guinea pig, or lab rat, this morning I gathered several fragments written in two different journals over the past two or three days, including some of my previous post here, and turned them into a new haibun piece. This is still a work in progress: I expect to revise it over the next few days; probably trim some chaff in spots, with better words in other spots; maybe a better title; et cetera. You have to sit with something awhile, or go away and come back later, to get clarity about it as a piece of writing.

This is how one might choose to practice writerly recycling, and revision, and the gathering of fragments into a more coherent whole. Perhaps it also demonstrates the principal of reading back through what you've loosely written over the past few days, and finding a common thread among the scattered pieces, to pull them all together to make something more like an actual artwork, rather than a journal entry. Hopefully this haibun will therefore, even in its unfinished state, reveal something about the creative process.

•

I've been losing time
visions overlay the world
interlocking wheels

Time falls around my ankles, a discarded robe before one steps into the bath, warmed by living flesh, soon to chill. Whole days wash off, slosh down the drain. A week suddenly gone, and nothing happened: or, everything happened, and you could not record it all. The recording angel naps those days when acedia rises in the east, the bloody and demanding sun. Red sky at night, sailor's delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning. I'm going to wash these blues right out of my hair.

Snow late last night, coating the gray world with white. I watched it fall in that perfect silence that new snowfall brings to the world, as blessing. Juncos, round slate-blue birds, come this morning to sit on the deck railings, kicking up tufts as they land and take off again. The live-in cardinal couple is brilliant against the white land, the male a moving laser-dot of bright red against a black and white background. The chokecherry tree will still produce its small sable berries over winter, and the birds will gather in its branches, come January, gorging themselves, and stooping down to pick through the snow under the tree for more fallen fruits.

Already melting. The sun coming out, fitfully, streaks of blue between the clouds. A few more light flakes falling, here and there, just particles of air-borne dry flakes. I worry, when I can’t find my gratitudes, even a poor and starving minimal thanks for being still alive. That temporary and conditional existence universally terminated in a face-on meeting with entropy.

Meister Eckhart:
If the only prayer
you ever said was "Thank you"—
that would suffice.

More lost time: Driving home after dinner in another town, the clouds thin and crumpled, an almost-full moon hangs high overhead. I think to myself, When did you get to be full again, moon? Then I realized, I hadn’t seen him for weeks, between illness and exhaustion, and all the lately cloudy weather. Suddenly the moon's eye was almost round again, silver behind mottled veils.

moonlight and starlight
on snow-draped fields near town:
black winter berries

I sit awhile at midnight, in the armchair with my heaviest quilt draped over, staring at the fire burning in the fireplace, no lights on, thinking. Moonlight on the snow outside makes a silver light, and a few stars peek through bare trees. The cold clear night both dark and light. The room is silent except for the sounds of the fire. I feel myself approach silence within. Nothing moves but the flames. The black lines of treeshadows on the white snow are arteries, rivers, tunnels between now and some deeper place.

snowlight firelight moonlight
candelight sunlight night that made us—
receive us all at the end

Lost time. Most kinds of freedom come with boundaries built in; the genuinely free mind doesn’t bind time the usual way, or insist on narrative, or even on consensus meaning. It also doesn’t reject it. Nothing is more unreal than the self-talk that claims to be real.

Let go, and go back to sitting and staring at the flames, while out of the corner of the eye, stars and treeshadows slowly turn the wheel of the sky’s clock, winding up, winding down. And the return to silence is durable, inevitable, unexpected, tremulous, like nothing else. The light flickers through the fireplace screen, and on the ceiling of the room, and splashes on floor and walls of the silent house.

unnamed falls
to frozen lakes—
silent water sleep

Kerygma

In earnest the mallards rise to the river's surface, and expel. On the sandbar, a clash of quacks and wings, a shrill ruckus that makes four deer wading at the ford pause. A stare, an earflick, then lowered heads drink before long ankles carry them on, white rumps gracefully swaying. Branches of a box elder, falling sideways as the rains erode its root-bound banks, droop over the sandbar. The mallards sleep there on hot afternoons, standing one-legged in the shallows, safe from overhead.

The grass is getting long, now. Leaves fall everywhere, dry green. Two woodchucks, brave and brown, lie on the glade and chaw at blades sawing in the breeze. Everyone pretends the redtail hawk has moved on. The sky's dome is dotted with black dots of sparrows, the woodchucks stay within reach of dense juniper bushes.

Oak branches curve down, black jagged lightning bearing fruit, where the wild turkey flock has just glided down. The day's round will take them foraging, then back here to roost. They fight and call in between bouts of pecking for food. In the evening, cinders zigzag from lower branches to higher, as they settle in.

Deer are silent, never saying much to strangers. They keep their dreams to themselves. You can listen a long time to hear a deer thinking. You must silently stalk them, downwind, remaining still when they look your way, unbreathing. When they look away, inch forward. When you can touch them, fingers brushing fur over spine or flank, and they do not start and run, perhaps then they'll speak to you.

And the eye of the great blue heron watches from its roost across the river. It preens long wing feathers. And the great golden eye orbs slowly in the ambering light. The heron turns to look at you, a long stare that could mean anything, could be a reproach, or a wish. And the great wings spread and flap as the giant neck lunges out. The heron swoops down and levels off above the stream, flying upriver, towards sleep, and dreams of silver-sided trout hovering in a deep riffle at the bend.

a gold maple leaf
the last to fall from its branch—
cicadas, ceasing