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.
by James Brush
Tag: haiku
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.
I started winter (and Christmas vacation) with a morning at Hornsby Bend. I hadn’t been since July when I came to check on the swallows and long-legged waders that own the place in summer. In winter it’s all about ducks, and Monday was a perfect day for birding so I headed down.
As expected, I mostly saw American Coots, Northern Shovelers and Ruddy Ducks, though I did see a few Buffleheads on Pond 1 East. I parked on the road between Pond 1 East and Pond 1 West and using the car as a blind, I was able to watch a flock of Least Sandpipers poke around the edges of 1 West while a few Killdeer hung around the periphery like avian shepherds, or perhaps overlords, watching their smaller kin.
Around the road to Pond 2, I saw more of the above-mentioned ducks, but as the road entered the woods, the Ruby-crowned Kinglets appeared, flitting across the road and sometimes stopping to have a look at me as I drove by. I stopped too.
On a winter branch,
a kinglet inclines his head,
shows his ruby crown.
I parked at the blind at Pond 2 where I watching the coots and ducks paddle around, forming great circular clusters (clusterducks?) in the pond, probably to conserve heat since unlike me, they were without coffee.
I heard a Red-shouldered Hawk nearby, so I headed down the river trail to see if I could find him. I never saw him, and when I heard him again he was farther off down the Colorado, but the trees were singing with birds, shaking off the cold and starting up for the day. In addition to the kinglets, cardinals, Song Sparrows, chickadees and wrens were everywhere. Though I didn’t actually see a Carolina Wren, there was one singing loud nearby and he seemed to be following me along the trail.
From the upper island view blind, I saw a mixed flock of Gadwalls and American Wigeons floating on the slow-moving river. I hung out at the upper island view for a while, digging the beautiful crisp morning and waiting to see what presented itself.
That’s one of the great things about birding, that waiting. Even though I tend to list (and upload my lists to ebird for whatever value they may have to the ornithologists at the Cornell Lab of O) I don’t tend to go hunting with the mindset of I’ve-got-to-find-this-bird. Once in a while, but not often. It’s best to see what birds come along and just enjoy what nature serves up on any given day.
Soon, the ducks flew upriver and out of sight, but watching the river drift by is good too so I did that for a while before I started to hear my coffee calling from the car. I went back and drove along Pond 2 to the greenhouse and parked there to walk out to Pond 3.
As I approached the river trail a small flock of something darted out of the sky and into the treetops. I glassed (I don’t know if that word has been used by anyone other than Cormac McCarthy, but it’s a great verb for this kind of thing) the treetops and saw my first life bird of the day: Cedar Waxwing. They say they’re common here in winter, but I’ve been looking for three years now and Monday was the first time I’d seen one.
They were high in the tree, almost beyond the useful range of my telephoto lens, but for what it’s worth here’s a picture.
I watched the waxings for a while, admiring these lovely little birds that seemed content just to ride the slow waving branches at the tops of the trees. Soon enough, they departed and so did I, continuing along the trail to Pond 3 on which there were more Northern Shovelers and Ruddy Ducks.
I did see a pair of Red-bellied Woodpeckers in a tree. They seemed to be hollering at each other. Like the waxwings, they were almost beyond the reach of my camera gear, but for what it’s worth, here’s a picture.
Close to lunchtime, I headed back to the car and drove out along Pond 1 West, where I saw perhaps thousands more ducks poking around on the mud flats. Among the shovelers, I saw a few glimpses of something new to me. I parked and searched through the horde of ducks until I found life bird number 2 for the day: Green-winged Teal.
It never ceases to amaze me how many and what variety of birds can be seen at Hornsby Bend right here in the Austin city limits. Every time I’ve been, I’ve seen something I’ve never seen before. Amazing considering I never go there looking for anything.
Here’s the list:
- Gadwall
- American Wigeon
- Northern Shoveler
- Green-winged Teal
- Bufflehead
- Ruddy Duck
- Great Blue Heron
- Great Egret
- Red-shouldered Hawk
- American Coot
- Killdeer
- Least Sandpiper
- Red-bellied Woodpecker
- Eastern Phoebe
- American Crow
- Carolina Chickadee
- Tufted/Black-crested Titmouse
- Carolina Wren
- Ruby-crowned Kinglet
- Northern Mockingbird
- European Starling
- Cedar Waxwing
- Orange-crowned Warbler
- Song Sparrow
- Northern Cardinal
- Red-winged Blackbird
- meadowlark sp.
- House Finch
Update: This post was included at I and the Bird #116 at Listening Earth Blog. Check out the rest of the birds there.
gauzy clouded sky,
like ink bleeding through paper—
unreadable blue
—
This week’s Read Write Poem prompt (#74: Hyperlink Your Poetry) was to hyperlink a poem and try to add a bit of depth. I wanted to try to hyperlink every word so I chose a haiku I wrote yesterday. In addition to hyperlinking, I decided to make use of the HTML title attribute so that when readers mouse over the words, there will be something to read that perhaps adds (or perhaps removes) something from the poem.
What emerges is essentially an annotated poem. Mousing over the individual words will reveal one of the following: a related haiku/mircopoem, word associations, a question, wordplay or process notes. Following the links will lead to other (sort of) related sites.
I tried to think of each word individually to see where associations would take me both in terms of what I wrote and the sites to which I linked.
Follow the links, too. Especially that last one.
For those who may want to play with the title attribute, here’s an example using the HTML for the word bleeding in the poem:
<a href=”http://www.xacto.com/” title=”how many times while cutting mattes have i bled for my art?”>bleeding</a>
∞
A young oak trembles:
the dying gusts of winter.
Flowers in the grass.
∞
An hour before sunrise,
rain drizzles through the trees.
A wren sings nearby.
∞
Swallows fill the sky,
returning on springtime winds,
far above our kites
∞
Just water on the pond—
the ducks have gone north.
Clouds cross a daytime moon.
Jays work on a nest.
∞
At migration’s end,
a scissor-tailed flycatcher
perches on a wire.
∞
I build my garden
and plan my meals.
The birds watch
and plan theirs.
∞
hailstones
rip through trees
and melt
∞
Spring’s first hummingbird
huddles against the cold.
Waiting for the sun.
—
These are for Read Write Prompt #72: Spring Is Sprung. I’ve been bogged down with other projects (a video, a series of poems, my job) so these are taken from my other blog, a gnarled oak, where I publish haiku and haiku-like things about nature (mostly). I’ve been writing a number of spring-themed poems there so I pulled some to share here. I also cross-post most of these to Twitter, so if you’re into this sort of thing, you can check that out too.
Happy spring!
Every tree along the trail to the pond wears its own cardinal, each claiming territory and attracting mates, filling the air with song. Gnatcatchers and kinglets hop through the branches with the chickadees. Blue Jays build a nest by the pond where the ducks had been until yesterday when they got the migration call and departed for points north. With all the birds alive and calling attention to themselves, the deer skeleton was quite a shock.
on a bed of leaves,
a deer skeleton picked clean,
save one furry hoof
I started another blog about a month ago, but kept it under my hat until I had a name for it. The name came this week: a gnarled oak.
It’s from this haiku I wrote last week:
I watched and listened—
a gnarled oak full of stories,
birds turned into words
a gnarled oak is a microblog where I’ll be posting short observational poem-like things mostly about birds and nature.
This started from my experiments with Twitter (you can follow me on Twitter where the gnarled oak stuff is automatically be cross-posted). The notion of posting every moment of one’s life is kind of silly so I just twittered short little poem-things and haiku. I discovered there are a lot of people who do this. Many quite well. I wanted a more personal and simpler space for these besides Twitter, and I discovered Tumblr, a microblogging platform that works nicely for this.
The things I post there are the things that often got written and lost in my paper journals, but after being inspired by a small stone, a handful of stones, The Morning Porch, TWITTERKU, Open Micro, Paiku, Haiku Habits, Full Moon of November, Oversouled and numerous others whose RSS feeds and tweets I’ve been enjoying, I decided to have a go at this style of blogging. Many of these sites are powered by Tumblr and that’s how I found it, so thanks to all of those for inspiring me.
Coyote Mercury is still my main joint, but you’ll find these other bits of writing that seem too small for a “full-size” blog laid out for large images at a gnarled oak where they won’t be overwhelmed and can kind of live by themselves in a simpler region of the blogosphere that lacks sidebars, comments, spam, and upgrades.
Check out a gnarled oak and have a look around. There’s even an rss feed for those who use readers.