I’m participating this new month in Fiona Robyn and Kaspa’s River of Stones, the international small stones writing month. A small stone “is a polished moment of paying proper attention.” Fiona has been kind enough to publish a few of my stones over the past few years at her small stone journal a handful of stones, and you can go there for some examples. Or better yet, visit the River of Stones and follow the links on the blogroll to see some of the stones people are writing this month.

I’m posting my stones over at a gnarled oak, where I publish my micro-poems. They’re also cross-posted at Twitter, Identi.ca and Facebook. Additionally, I’ll probably post a weekly summary of them here. Maybe.

My stones typically show up as haiku, though not always. Here’s today’s:

The great blue heron
stands in the still creekside grass.
Patient as stone.

Also, I made another gnarled oak chapbook of my favorite micro-poems from 2010. It’s a holiday gift I make for family and friends, and I save a few for blog readers. If you’d like one, use the contact page to let me know and tell me where to send it. I’ve got 10 to give away here. They’re free and I’ll mail them anywhere. Go here to have a look at the digital version of last year’s.

Yesterday morning, I got to work unusually early. I didn’t get up any earlier; I just moved a little a faster getting ready. It wasn’t intentional, but sometimes that happens. I even stopped for coffee, and still I was at work before the sun was up, well, I would have been if the sun had come up, but it was a nice cold drizzly morning so there was no sun, just the good crisp early dark.

As I pulled into the parking lot, I saw a crested caracara swoop over the lot and across the road right in front of me. I slowed down to watch him soar out over the fields near the building, gaining altitude and quickly becoming nothing more than a dark point in the gray expanse of sky.

I don’t see caracaras often, and I’ve never seen one around where I work. I’ve seen a lot of interesting birds around the building, but this was kind of a treat. As I watched him fly away, I couldn’t help but think of the previous night’s election and wonder what sort of meaning might have been read into the appearance of such a beautiful raptor. Good omen or ill?

I’m not one to take stock in omens, but the idea of reading our hopes and fears and finding either solace or justification in some bird’s random passing fascinates me. Perhaps the crested caracara’s black and white coloration could represent the newly divided nature of our government. Perhaps the bird’s powerful flight could imply that with divided government we can soar over all our problems.

Or maybe it’s a warning about the modern conservative penchant for viewing the world in black and white. Perhaps I should have looked for some gray birds: a mourning dove or scissor-tailed flycatcher. Most of the scissor-tails have already fled the country, though.

On the other hand, this bird is known colloquially as the Mexican eagle. So maybe its northbound flight across the field symbolizes illegal immigrants, and predatory ones at that, sneaking through the dawn into our country to destroy our culture and do all the other horrible things the right wing expects.

Speaking of wings, the bird did have both a healthy and functioning right and left wing. Neither one was dominant, and that circles me back (hopefully not too much like a vulture which I also saw an unusual number of yesterday) to that divided government thing. I do generally prefer divided government. Perhaps that’s a function of having once been a debate coach playing with my mostly optimistic nature.

I watched the bird disappear, feeling a little sorry for the poor guy for all the burdens I’d just laid on his shoulders, I mean, he’s just a bird trying to find something to eat in a world where such meals must seem increasingly scarce to a hunter like him. I wondered if our newly elected Republican house had any member who would worry themselves over wildlife and healthy ecosystems. If that wasn’t such a heartbreaking thought, I might have laughed.

In the gray predawn,
a crested caracara
swoops over the road.

This is an attempt at doing a video haiku, basically using Dave Bonta’s approach, which I really like. In this case, it’s almost documentary. It’s from my day in Central Park last week. One thing I noticed while birding in The Ramble was that whenever I stopped for a few minutes and just watched, the ground started to move with squirrels, sparrows, and all sorts of other critters. To see it, I had to stop. I tried to capture a little bit of it on video and the haiku came from notes I wrote at the time. Sitting and watching (or in this case, standing and watching) and that quiet openness to experience that ensues is the essence of both birding and haiku. At least for me. I don’t know if this video captures any of that, but it at least documents the process.

We communicated in images. Flickering moments on dueling monitors. Shoes on cobbled pavement. Clothes rustle in the wind. Wind? We both understand this thing, wind. The colors are suddenly blinding. I can’t even name them. The view of open parkland and a blue pond widens to almost 360 degrees. My stomach drops as the ground falls away, earth tumbling into a pit of sky, images bleeding off the monitors now. We’re flying again. It’s all she thinks about, the only thing she’ll show. I rip the cables from my temples. She flaps them from her wings. We stare at one another across the sterile distance of the research lab. Going nowhere. Again. A white feather floats on the air-conditioned current. We’re as alien and far apart as ever. Three feet away yet separated by species and the awkwardness of the now-severed connection with its illusion of understanding and love. Can she feel it too? She doesn’t blink, her avian eyes as incomprehensible as the machines humming in this lab. I glance at the security cameras and lean in. Please, I whisper, please. Don’t make me leave. I’ll show you everything. Outside, I hear engines and the wind of ten thousand wings beginning to flap.

A flight of egrets
glides toward the setting sun—
the moon rises.

—

This is for Big Tent Poetry’s challenge to write a haibun about travel and an encounter with an imaginary creature. I love haibun, though my approach has been intentionally nontraditional. I’d like to learn more, but I also like the notion of feeling my way into something new and playing with it a little bit like the way I’ll fiddle with a new instrument before attempting to learn how to play it.

I suppose this is why my haibun tend to read more like prose poems. Most of them actually start with the haiku, which tend to be pretty straightforward and traditional. I then write a prose poem piece that goes in a completely different direction. I often think of the prose piece as fictional process notes.

Sometimes I think I might just revise the haiku out completely and let the prose stand alone, but for now I like the way the haiku contrasts with the prose and grounds the charge, bringing things back to Earth. This Earth anyway.

Finally, the internet is working again, so I can direct your attention elsewhere…

Another of my haiku is up over at tinywords. Check it out and while you’re there, have a look around at the rest of Issue 10.1. It’s well-worth the time.

Also, thanks to Adam Ford for including my poem “Looking for Flaws, Hoping to Find Some” on his June 2010 Poetry Mix Tape. Be sure to check out the others linked there.

One of my vulture-related haiku is up over at tinywords today as part of Issue 10.1. Go check it out and have a look around while you’re there. There are lots of great haiku and micro-poems presented on a beautifully designed site.

There’s a swagger in the way the cattle egret walks across the fields of this fenced frontier, wingtips looped into his belt buckle. He won’t talk much at first, but if you get him going he’ll spin stories like country songs—beer drinkin’, cloaca kickin’ and trains beyond the horizon. He’ll tell of blue northers ripping down the plains and the time he lit a fire under a mule that hadn’t moved in two days. He waits while you imagine what a burning mule would smell like and then tells how the mule just moved over a couple feet from the fire and stayed put another two days before movin’ on. Usually, though, he just stares out past the longhorns, dreaming lonely dreams from another time. Maybe he even writes a song or two about the rough and tumble old birds of the past. In the evening, after a long day picking bugs off the backs of settled cows, he sends demos to Nashville and Austin hoping he’ll make it big someday.

glowing orange
the cattle egrets fly off
into the sunset

I ask the egret what makes him great. He smiles his bird smile and tells me of forbidden passion and how he loved and lost a snowy egret once. Held great roosts on the other side of the pond, invited all the shorebirds, hoping—just hoping—she’d maybe wade up his shore. At night he stood one-legged in a tree, ignoring the herons all around, while he studied the faint light reflected in the rippling water across the pond—I stop him there, tell him it sounds like he’s cribbing this story from Fitzgerald.  Yes, he says, returning to the present, it’s true, it’s true, but there is no copyright for the heart, and besides… she was so beautiful and it was spring and the stars were bright and we were fledglings in the days of love.

egret reflections
ripple the still pond
echoes fade

Two things:

1. While I was out of town last week, I forgot to link to Four and Twenty, where one of my haiku was featured as the “Four and Twenty of the week.” Check it out.

2. You may have noticed the type on my site is larger. Ever since I redesigned the site in Jan 2009 to ditch the 2nd sidebar and widen the content area to accommodate larger photos something has bugged me about the font. I’ve tried different fonts but after reading iA’s The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard (h/t Dave for the link), I realized that what was bugging me was the size of the font relative to the expanded line length.

I tried a larger font, and I like the results. How does it look out there in blog land? Easier on the eyes?

I’ve got two micro-poems in the latest issue of Four and Twenty (vol.3 no.3 – pdf) out today. There’s an untitled haiku on p5 and “Optimist” (another vulture poem) on p14. Go check it out. There’s lots of great micro-poetry there.