.
.
to get their own fire they abandoned time the cold bed
.
Wow. I did it. Posted every day in February. Thanks to all who came to hang out with me again. I’ll probably be dialing down the frequency a notch now but I’m not going away because I remembered that I actually like this stuff. And you. (Though I think I’m done with erasing “Melissa” for a while because man, doing that hurt my head. And Taylor Caldwell’s prose like to kill me.)
.
Also, send me some polar vortex poems.
.
.
purple haze
he answers my fire
with smoke
.
.
.
driving
away from
the fire
with an
unknown
name
.
skipping
a winter
or two
before
the end
of the world
.
random
access
memory
I find
more fog
to take your place
.
.
beating back god every morning a new forest fire
.
thistledown as far as light can bend
.
every windfall a different frequency into the night
.
Before I even get to the party everyone there knows I’m getting divorced, so I don’t have to tell anyone or pretend to be happier or saner than I actually am. This is what gossip is good for, I think, drinking my third glass of wine. I don’t think I’ve ever had a third glass of wine in my life. Someone tells me, “All change is for the better.” Yes, yes, I think, sipping wine and eyeing the chocolate, tell it to the dinosaurs.
New Year’s bonfire
stories of what we lost
this year
.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Dear friends,
2011 was hard for me. 2012 may well be harder. I’m not sure how I would be surviving without poetry, or without all of you. I’m glad I don’t have to.
Things change. And I don’t like that. I cling to the driftwood of sameness until it’s carried me so far out to sea I’ve forgotten where I came from and where I wanted to go, until the wood disintegrates and I’m left holding only splinters. And then, forced to let go and swim, I flail the way an inexperienced swimmer flails in the cold waves of the sea, not knowing that letting the wave wash over you — carry you — expends less energy and is less likely to get you drowned.
One of my resolutions for 2012 is to let those variable waves carry me and see where I get. I suspect I’ll spend some time in the deep ocean, cold and frightened, not sure how to get back. Treading water might be the best I can do for a while. But inevitably, the tide turns; salt water is easy to float in; and it seems likely that I’ll make it back eventually to some kind of solid land. Maybe not the same land I started out from. Maybe a better land, maybe worse; almost certainly survivable. And there will be poetry there and there will be friends. Possibly there will even be extended, strained metaphors. You never know.
Happy New Year, friends. And thank you for everything.
.
so I start thinking
about the next thing I’ll be…
all day the scent
of pine sap I can’t scrub
from my fingers
.
.
.
.
.
May Day
every nest
has a voice
.
anniversary new cells in my writing hand
.
Beltane
in the rear-view mirror
a faraway fire
.
.
.
A year ago today I started this blog. I’d written a few haiku over the previous few days — something I’d practically never done before — and for some reason felt that they needed to be inflicted on the world. And that I needed to write more — every day, in fact — and inflict all those on the world as well.
I’m not sure what I was thinking. Maybe it was something to do with it being May Day, which has always seemed like one of the year’s pivotal days to me. Well, it is, of course. In the Japanese conception of the seasons, this is approximately the day that summer begins. (It ends, of course, in early August, when you first begin to sense that melancholy in the air. You know that melancholy? The Japanese love that. They call it autumn and get all weepy and happy. Me too.)
This was also true of European cultures until fairly recent times, which is why we call the summer solstice midsummer. The first of May went by a variety of names for the pre-modern Europeans: Beltane, Walpurgisnacht. It was about purification, fertility, all that useful stuff. There were bonfires to symbolically cleanse things, and dancing to get sexy. The harvest was going in, the thaw was finally complete, the layers of clothes were coming off…time for a party.
Here in southern Wisconsin, and also in southern New England, where I was raised, May is the month when you finally feel like you can breathe easy, because now there’s practically no chance that there will be any more significant snowfall or lengthy cold spells until November. (Practically no chance, I said. This year, I wouldn’t put it past May to dump a blizzard on us or something.)
So for those of us around here who spend most of the winter weeping quietly in a corner, the beginning of May is the time when we creep out of our corners and put away the boxes of Kleenex and admit that, just possibly, life might be worth living. New projects start to seem as enticing as new clothes.
Hence, I suspect, my more or less insane undertaking of last May 1. I remember feeling a sense of great satisfaction at seeing my first post go up, with that big “1 May” on it. It made the whole thing seem much more real than all the previous times I’d started blogs, on whatever forgettable days I started them on. And right from the beginning, this blog felt different than all those other blogs, which lasted only until I figured out that I didn’t actually have anything to say, typically after three or four days.
Writing haiku, I found, especially once I started to figure out what haiku actually were, made me feel like I did in fact have something to say, that there was actually an infinite universe of things to say, because, of course, there is an infinite universe — and if you keep your eyes open you will always be able to observe something worth observing, and worth telling someone else about.
I still feel like that. I sometimes go crazy, in fact, from the number of things there are to say about the world in haiku. Not that I have really figured out how to say them well most of the time, but that challenge is always there. Those possibilities delight me. The whole world, passing by in a predictable but novel-seeming cycle year after year, trip after trip around the sun — how could that ever not be enough for anyone to write about?
Haiku can be thought of as time-tellers or time-markers — a large part of their original function was to announce the season that a particular string of linked verse was beginning in — and now that I have spent an entire year with haiku, have written all the obligatory leaf-falling and snow-falling and blossom-falling verses, have marked all the changes of the moon, and come back around to the beginning, that aspect of their nature is beginning to intrigue me more than ever.
The year is a cycle; it’s good to know when you are in it. It’s also good to know when you are in your life. When was before this? When’s after it? Most importantly — when is now? Writing haiku — I won’t say always, because I never say always, and I reserve the right to change my mind about everything — is a way of saying: I was here, then. That was now. And since time keeps flowing, there is always another now to write about. I feel very lucky about that.
*
Thanks for hanging around with me this past year and listening politely while I wandered around babbling incoherently. I appreciate it immensely. I mean, no matter how great I thought haiku were, I doubt I would have kept writing a blog that no one ever read or commented on. Or one of those blogs where people are always arguing and yelling at each other.
Fortunately, instead of one of those sad, dysfunctional-family kinds of blogs, I have the kind of happy-family blog that is constantly filled with the pleasant voices of many kind visitors. It never feels like work to hang out here. Practically everything else feels like work, but not this. (She says, staring gloomily at the pile of end-of-term projects that she’s way, way behind on.)
I have some vague thoughts for fun things we can do together this summer. But right now, I’m a little too busy and sleep-deprived to form these thoughts into coherent ideas, let alone coherent words. Give me a couple of weeks, okay?
Happy May Day. Go build a fire. And do a little dance. Come on, you know you want to.
.
.
.
evening star
the blacksmith shows me
how to judge the heat
.
.
___________________________________________________________________________________
NaHaiWriMo prompt: Fire
Moving on:
NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 28th:
Doors
See this post for an explanation of what this is.
See the NaHaiWriMo website.
See the NaHaiWriMo Facebook page, and contribute haiku there if you want. (It doesn’t have to have anything to do with this prompt. It’s just a suggestion.)
.
.
.
swing—
we take turns
pushing each other
.
.
___________________________________________________________________________________
(NaHaiWriMo prompt: Playgrounds, playground equipment)
.
Moving on: NaHaiWriMo prompt for April 27th:
Fire
See this post for an explanation of what this is.
See the NaHaiWriMo website.
See the NaHaiWriMo Facebook page, and contribute haiku there if you want. (It doesn’t have to have anything to do with this prompt. It’s just a suggestion.)
the fire’s ashes
no time to taste
what we’ve been given
speaking
and being heard
fire
prairie burning
at Easter
dead stalks crackle
Red Dragonfly 