Instinct and Natural Mechanisms
Today the weather shifts back to more spring-like temperatures. Despite the warm day, I fight off a cold: stuffed head, dripping nose, weakness in the legs. And then too the medicine causes me often to daydream and lose focus. To compose one sentence may take five or more minutes of concentration.
It does not help that my writing desk faces the front of the house. The full landscape outside the window distracts, and at the same time, comforts my wandering eye. The scene includes a man-made canal and small copse of trees, clusters of cypress and water-oak. This afternoon I have watched a marsh crane patrol the banks, walking slowly, steadily, purposely, marching up and down the edges of the water, hunting for food. Shall I compare him to a Prussian soldier? —traditional priest in an ankle length cassock? —wandering haiku poet?
More than once he has appeared in my haiku poems: a presence of authority and custom. His rhythm suits a poem. The whole of his body ticking forward with a precision of joints and feathers, instinct and natural mechanisms. A counter-example of the tanka verse I wrote for today.
It does not help that my writing desk faces the front of the house. The full landscape outside the window distracts, and at the same time, comforts my wandering eye. The scene includes a man-made canal and small copse of trees, clusters of cypress and water-oak. This afternoon I have watched a marsh crane patrol the banks, walking slowly, steadily, purposely, marching up and down the edges of the water, hunting for food. Shall I compare him to a Prussian soldier? —traditional priest in an ankle length cassock? —wandering haiku poet?
More than once he has appeared in my haiku poems: a presence of authority and custom. His rhythm suits a poem. The whole of his body ticking forward with a precision of joints and feathers, instinct and natural mechanisms. A counter-example of the tanka verse I wrote for today.
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131 / another series of weeks, leaking oil, locked in slow decomposition—the neighbor’s car remains unmoved from front of their house—•
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