alphabet—
a barn swallow’s loops
in paper sky
by James Brush
alphabet—
a barn swallow’s loops
in paper sky
wind chime
the slow movement of clouds
between two trees
someone’s mask
crumpled in the field
pink primrose
a new day
traffic cones & trees
in the fog
so many leaves
high in this bare winter tree
cedar waxwings
second dose
winter rages deep
inside me
The greyhounds navigate ice like arthritic giraffes—splay-legged and strange—their speed left indoors today.
icy trees
creaking in the wind
whispered threats
cop sirens
the woods between us
coyotes
At some point walking down the same trail that’s so familiar but still capable of surprise, I realize I can count life in decades now, neatly dividing events into personal eras. The path descends to a tree where I turn for a loop along the creek that tomorrow will find the river.
a certain slant of flight
in the bleak December sky—
crows heading home
///
Lately, I’ve gotten back into making videos. This is my fourth in the past month. This one is from a sequence of three related haiku from Highway Sky called “all roads lead here,” a series of LA-related poems.
Since the “poem” is sort of three poems, I wanted the video to have three parts, and I choose footage that I felt would complement the parts, which in essence tell a story of driving to LA in the middle of the night with the intention of watching the sun set on the beach. If you travel to LA from Texas, you’ll probably come in on I-10 which turns into the Santa Monica Freeway and kind of ends at the Santa Monica Pier. So I wanted footage that followed that trajectory. The footage came from Videvo.net, and I was fortunate to find the LA shot and the Santa Monica beach shots with the others shot who-knows-where.
Things got interesting as I was editing. The more I looked at it, I realized I could cut a line from the first haiku which originally read (as published at tinywords):
a hundred miles out
the glow of Los Angeles
desert starlight
The second line seemed redundant with the footage of the LA skyline and city lights. Likewise, I was able to cut the first line from the third haiku as the sunset-over-the-waves image did the work of the first line.
the sun falls to sea
here at the end of the road
nothing left to say
The central haiku was left alone, but I played with the text to try to put it in motion and show the action of the waves erasing the name.
For the sound, I originally imagined some reverb-soaked surf music. I tried something on my guitar and looked for CC music online, but didn’t find anything. On a lark, I tried some wave sounds and liked how it sounded like highway noise while the cars were on screen, but sounded like waves once the beach shot comes in. Interesting how the image can affect what we think we’re hearing.
I liked this process of adaptation. When movies are adapted from books and stories, filmmakers change things. They fire characters and compress scenes in part to save money on paying actors and renting space, but also because there is often no need to say what is shown. Why not something similar with poetry?
I think writers and probably poets especially can get locked into the sanctity of their words and lord knows there are times when that makes sense, but if poetry is to be a conversation even if as in this case with oneself, I think it’s important to let go a little bit especially when changing mediums. My academic background is in film production and screenwriting where the expectation is that the written word is not final so maybe this comes easier for me, but it’s a comfortable way for me to work and I think it’s useful to see where your words can go and a worthwhile exercise to keep playing with what you’ve made and, if you dare, open it up for others to do so as well.