Mittens

Calling for the cat

at dusk -- stars emerge

one at a time.

Mittens, my first true feline friend, I will miss you. Your sapphire eyes, your six-toed paws, your fur as thick and dark as a seal's--I will never forget your strange beauty. When I came home to my apartment alone, you greeted me. When I was anxious and overworked, you lay down and napped with me. You voiced your complaints and requests in the flat, off-key tones of a Siamese, making me laugh whenever you talked to me. You will always be in my heart. 

Haiku first published at A Hundred Gourds, September 2013

Waiting for Firewood

The truckload of firewood that we bought in October won't last through this arctic winter. November's blizzard left the pine logs locked in ice, and we have to use an axe to knock them free from the frozen snow. We leave the damp logs in the sunroom to dry out so that they'll burn efficiently. Warming in the sun, they fill the room with the fragrance of evergreen. Meanwhile, we're waiting for our second load of firewood to arrive. Last year our fall delivery lasted well into March or April. 

I know the cold won't last forever, but there's a feeling of profound stasis about it, as if time itself were stuck at sub-zero. Late at night, when I come home from work, the house feels like a tiny box suspended in a frozen black ocean. Its only sources of warmth are the leftover heat from the day's sunlight and the little wood stove. For the first time since we moved here in 2009, our jokes about death by hypothermia have a note of reality. On the coldest of these frigid nights, I long to fall into a bed warmed by central heating, with the musical click-roar of a furnace soothing me to sleep. I want to forget my fears about the pipes freezing, the electricity failing, the firewood running out. 

But there never seems to be enough space in centrally heated rooms. The mechanically generated heat feels dry, claustrophobic. It smells of dust--or worse, of nothing at all. 

Sunlight and pine sap --

on a January morning
I lay the night's fire

Entangled

After a summer of rare, drenching rains, tumbleweeds took over the Valley. Dislodged by September winds, the skeletal clumps huddled along our dirt roads, skittered across stones, bounced hopelessly in the wake of speeding vehicles. They ventured out of the rural areas and ended up in town, always in the most inappropriate places. One afternoon I passed a pickup truck driving down the highway with a weed stuck in its grille like a jaunty brown corsage. Another thistle-ball, at least two feet in diameter, blocked State Street across from our favorite coffee shop, mocking that small attempt at civilization. 

Uprooted flocks raced across the plains when the wind kicked up, their passage blocked by barbed wire fences. They clung to the wire with grim desperation until a November blizzard released their grip.

softening under snow

the harsh entanglements
of autumn

Christmas 2013

El Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico
Photo by Eric Havelock-Bailie - December 2013

Abandoned Furniture

Locals who've been in the Valley for awhile say the snow hasn't been this deep east of Alamosa since the early 1990s. We got about a foot-and-a-half last week in Blanca Flats. Wind-sculpted banks lay over the furniture left by one of our neighbors. I explored the site with the dogs this afternoon and found an unoccupied sofa, a lonely silhouette of civilization against a wilderness of white. 

There was also (of course) a broken toilet peeking out of a snowdrift. Imagine using the commode in this hypothermic environment, meditating on the monochromatic hills . . . .

Signs of Winter

October morning --

the mountain's blue couloirs

have already gone white

*   *   *

Tufts of ghost sage

turn to powder between my fingers:

all the words I've forgotten

Autumn Moon

I feel guilty about my failure to keep up with the seasons on this blog. I've watched the chalky summer prairies turn a dozen shades of green in the rain. I've seen that same rain bring the first snow to Blanca Peak weeks earlier than usual, then leave her brilliant green from the waist down. Phrases flicker through my mind, rarely stopping long enough to form three coherent lines. Sometimes being an observer is all I can handle. 

But as I looked back at my haiku diary today (the old-fashioned kind of diary, the one you don't show anyone), I realized that I had three haiku about the autumn moon, in different states of being. 

New moon --

over darkening fields

the white pendulum.

*   *   *

Equinox moon

transparent in a hard blue sky

at high noon.

*   *   *

Harvest moon;

the tumbleweed's brown spines

have turned magenta.