Dawn Light

This view of Blanca at dawn reminds me of one of my favorite Mary TallMountain poems.

Bright Shining

Companion to me in every place,
You stretch your hand: I see
Majesties of mountains
Crowned with living light.

Your arm flings wide: I see
Wild little islands wrapt in fog
Grey luminous; hidden folds
Of emerald and ermine earth.

I fly free clean through glowing
Cat's eye aquamarine
Filled with light air breath

Swaddled in this cocoon
This dense and lifeless mass
Yet weightless I
soaring with it shall be for you

Light bright shining


by Mary TallMountain
The Light on the Tent Wall
Los Angeles: University of California, 1990

August Shadows

Clouds over granite --

suddenly your face appears

in August's shadows.

I haven't written any new haiku since August. I guess I've been in a survival mode, trying to finish my reflexology program while scraping together enough income to keep things going. But I also believe that poetry and photography are also necessary for survival; maybe that's why I've had such a deep sense of fatigue lately. I want to be able to stop worrying about money, bills, taxes, etc., but I also need to start writing poems and stories again, and taking walks with my camera the way I used to.

Uninvited Guests

Golden June morning--

in every coffee cup

a tiny brown bug.

Rain Offering

I throw coffee grounds

at the foot of Mount Blanca:

Bring us summer rain. 

This blog feels like a dusty house, closed up for months. Everything looks and smells different, but I'm the one who's changed. I couldn't write haiku for several months. I finally realized that I was grasping too hard at them--struggling to make them work. Then I stopped for awhile to focus on other things. A couple of weeks ago I read a copy of Clark Strand's Seeds from a Birch Tree: Writing Haiku and the Spiritual Journey. I read it from the perspective of someone who's lost the ability to write haiku, and then one day, after I'd finally stopped trying, the fragments started coming back. 

Every afternoon the sky fills up with water, but we rarely get any actual moisture. Thunder growls, and a hot, white wind blows dust into the kitchen, but no rain. The coffee grounds are my rain offering. In the morning when I make coffee, I throw the old grounds at the mountain in hopes that she'll make the clouds let go of their burden by the end of the day. With these wildfires, we need it more than ever.

Hoofprints

We walked up to the Dome recently to see the new green lichen growing on the rocks. There may be pooled water or even a small spring under the rocks; the Dome attracts a lot of wildlife. The earth around the Dome had been marked by dozens of hooves in various sizes.

A message in dust,

letters from a wild font:

antelope hoofprints.

Morning Mist

Gray morning drenched with sage --

snow on the mountain's crest

turns to mist at her feet.

Blanca Meets Alma

Eric hand-painted this sign to mark one of the roads on the way to our house. The sign had been missing for months, and we were worried that our friends would get lost trying to find our place. We have very few visitors, so we try to make it as easy as possible for those who venture out here to find us.

Writing haiku and tanka has been very hard for me lately. I've been distracted by work and by worries about finding work. I've applied for jobs in larger areas. I worry about leaving the Valley. Thinking about leaving makes me feel like I should start to separate myself from the area. But then I wonder why I eventually detach myself from everything that's deeply important to me.

A Place in the World

When the world outside meets the world inside,
the ragged edges of a torn self
find each other, settle in,
and form a seam.

And you learn that gravity is not a force
that keeps your body on the earth
when you most want to leave,
but something more like grace,
guiding you to a place
you never left.