.
last of October
(a reminder
to make amends
with my ghost)
(or be smashed
like a pumpkin)
.
Month: October 2012
(temptation)
.
October the temptation to be bitten into
.
Modern Haiku 43.3
.
(Why? It hurts, that’s why.)
what if the meaning of red dragonfly
.
Yes, that’s right. It’s that time again. Time for found poetry consisting entirely of search terms that were used to find my blog recently.
Well? What if the meaning of red dragonfly? Then what?
.
red dragonfly but out at night
what are dragonflies like, similes?long poems about morning rain
haiku on popsicle
birthday girl on the telephone
dark surrealism bicycles
garden mushrooms underneath
shine of the moon clouds
poems about everything
scissors used in poetry
cherryblossom japanliving shortstory writer
mushroom dreams sweatshirt
even mushroom tree
whistle balloon
happy girl waving goodbye
.
Frozen
.
After an unseasonable October snowstorm, my mother’s power has been out for three days. She shuttles back and forth between friends’ houses and the hospital where my grandfather is eking out an existence in the wake of a heart attack he didn’t tell anyone he’d had, stopping at home every so often to check on her frozen foods buried in the snow. She tells me about her friend’s maple tree, the red leaves at the height of their beauty, the white snow setting them off in unexpected fashion. I get fixated on that image and forget to listen to what she’s telling me about her plans for my future.
.
low clouds
from day to day
my bookmark never moves
.
.
.
(cloud shapes)
.
cloud shapes
the therapist tells me
I’m normal
.
.
A Hundred Gourds 1.4
.
.
(bittersweet)
.
.
bittersweet our talk of stamen and pistil
.
Modern Haiku 43.3
.
.
The new issue of Modern Haiku came in the mail the other day, so that was basically all anyone heard from me for the rest of the night. Among other good things there was an essay by Jim Kacian about haiku that are not three lines long. It’s interesting to think about why three lines sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. It’s interesting that it works so often. The question is whether it works because we make it work — because we think of ourselves as writing three-line poems — or because there is something intrinsically haiku-ish about three lines. I haven’t answered that question to my satisfaction yet.
There’s so much good stuff in Modern Haiku. I gave a little talk this week at the university here about the history of English-language haiku (which was a blast, partly because I had a great audience), and I ended up talking a lot about Modern Haiku, because you can’t talk about the history of English-language haiku without talking a lot about Modern Haiku. They’ve been around almost the same amount of time. Pretty much everything that is in English-language haiku shows up in Modern Haiku at some point.
Here’s some of what I liked the most this time around.
.
morning light
the little pile of snow
before the keyhole
— Marilyn Appl Walker
.
new moon
someone else will hear
my words for you
— Petar Tchouhov
.
midnight
the gender gap
closed
— Dietmar Tauchner
.
my home burning down in the curve of her hips autumn night
— Mike Spikes
.
an oak living that long without a center
— Neil Moylan
.
dead of winter
making stock
from the bones
— Jayne Miller
.
in tune with its obstacles, rain
— Eve Luckring
.
leaves on the river bank beginning dialysis
— Scott Glander
.
dawn crows the scuffle of nomenclature
— Cherie Hunter Day
.
bad translation
.
.
.
autumn equinox:
my online personal ad
in bad translation
(these bifocals
sure don’t help)
“the number of planets
I can see
keeps changing”
“look out — your oxygen tent
is about to collapse!”
“it was just the tip
of his tongue
that got bitten off”
(there’s a YouTube video
about that)
.
intensive
.
I just had occasion to spend three days in a hospital intensive care unit (I was working, not being sick, don’t worry). Alarms go off all the time there, all of which look and sound the same to me (basically, like ohmyGod someone’s dying do something right now!). To the nurses, though–big, big differences.
.
October…
blood soaking
into the test strip
.
Most of the alarms bore the nurses. They barely look up when the beeping starts. Even when there’s, like, a red flashing alert on the monitor about someone’s heartbeat being all out of whack. The nurses know what kind of out of whack is really worrisome and what kind is the monitor being, frankly, kind of a worrywart.
.
October—my brittle teeth surprise me by not breaking
.
When it’s a real alarm, though, they move. You look up and the nurse who was sitting two feet away from you half a second ago is nowhere in sight. Where’d she go? To check on Mr. Darby.
.
October
the side view mirror
breaks off in my hand
.
How do they know? I kept wondering. I never know. I never know what to worry about. All the alarms sound the same. And the world is full of alarms. (Have you noticed that? Or is it just me?)
.
October
I quickly throw my life
into a suitcase
.
.
Red Dragonfly 