January 27 (The Woodpecker)

alone —
the woodpecker drills deep
into my thoughts

November 17: Department / of Redundancy / Department

yesterday
if only
yesterday

 

passing
swallows
passing

 

alone
you promise me
alone

 

______________________

There is a Russian expression, “Repetition is the mother of learning,” which if you ever study Russian you will undoubtedly learn on pretty much your first day on the job and be subjected to, um, repeatedly for the remainder of your Russian-language-learning career. Anyway, I sometimes think I absorbed the lesson of this little saying a little too well, since, as everyone who’s spent more than five minutes reading this blog knows, I am constantly repeating myself. That is, I say the same thing over and over again. Until you’re sick of hearing about it. Then I say it again.

Going back through my disorganized archives of half-completed, partially-revised, mostly-abandoned, disgustedly-rejected haiku, I found these things that had just seemed like fragments at the time. But suddenly I liked them. They reminded me of my brain, feverish and iterative as it is. I thought they belonged together. So they’re here. Here they are.