I can't keep my mind off the flowers.
Or the moon, which I watched rise last Thursday, full.
In the wild phlox bloom
Spring's Pink Moon opens its one
Apricot blossom.
Spring hasn't really made it here yet. February made a half-hearted try, but gave into the insistence of March and April storms.
We'll get phlox, but not yet.
Bud-weighted branches
Turn tips up into twilight
Limning shards of sky.
Love the negative space stained glass window.
May's moon flower wanes.
Desert cliffrose wells up stars
In clouds of fragrance.
A breeze draws soft rain
Through the window screen, gently
Wetting my dry hands.
Clouds of fragrance works well for spring and presages datura blossoms in summer.
As each puddle forms
The same star again appears
To sink through earth's skin.
A night-watering puzzle.
Ephemerella
Climb through the stream and stand on
Tension of waters.
On my office wall I have a print of an Escher drawing of leaves floating on the surface of a pond, interrupting a fish beneath the water, and the reflection of bare trees atop it. Stars would work.
My dictionary shows that haiku is formed from hai, "amusement," plus ku, "sentence."
I think what we're leaning toward is riddleku.
Once yellow flowers
Grizzly bear's splayed toes plump, turn
Red on wide green pads.
Yours called to mind the opening lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "Spring and Fall: To a Young Child":
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the thoughts of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
I've seen the Escher print, the one with the reflections of trees that look like roots extending into the water's depths. Did the leaves come from those trees?
Crickets and lace wings
Sing long summer songs into
Lengthening shadows.
Yes, that Escher print.
There is something about words that can twist one direction, then another, in a breeze, like aspen leaves. An enlargement of puns, perhaps, but I find myself crafting just such ku-hais.
Which leads back to the question of meaning, intent, re-intent, and re-meaning.
Ever since a backcountry encounter with a fresh grizzly print, I've responded to such words with a tightness.
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