trees – Page 11 – don't confuse the narrator

images

There are times I can see the appeal of Twitter for a writer, particularly for poets. I often ‘find’ an image that I know will probably one day find its way into a poem, but that I don’t have time to think through and connect to other things right away.

So, in 140 characters – or less, to make it easily re-tweetable – I could capture that image in a kind of tweet’ku.

There again, I already spend enough time updating the blog, so perhaps I’m better off posting such things here, particularly as I can include the photo directly. Like this:

Cob nuts in mob caps

the spaces between

The heart nests in the bone tree.
She chatters idly, then sings
when the sun touches her. In Spring
she seeks a mate, peeping
from behind a complex foliage
of words and silences.

(An old poem posted because the photo reminded me of the ‘complex foliage’. Having found it, I thought I’d try and remember something about how and why I wrote it.)

It was Castaneda’s Don Juan who talked of not seeing the shapes of the tree and its leaves, but instead looking at the spaces between them.
Continue reading “the spaces between”

spring cleaning

Outside open windows
blossom clouds the orchard;
my dustpan is full of pollen.

Alternatively, and more in keeping with the haiku spirit:

through open windows
apple blossom;
yellow dust on the floor

plane and fancy

Not all the plane trees in the area are the carefully trimmed and ‘domesticated’ ones I mentioned in the post Plane Speaking. There are some along the other side of the river that are huge and untrimmed.

Which is why I had to look up straight into the sun to take this picture the other day.

Of course, if the sun hadn’t been directly behind it, I wouldn’t have noticed the tiny halo of light caught on the stem of the lowest hanging fruit. It was as bright and pretty as any Christmas-tree bauble wrapped in tinsel. And almost impossible to catch using a phone camera.