Please do not confuse these with haiku, or art, or anything but what they seem to be. I’ll declare that sometimes the brevity of a 17 syllable expression attracts my muse – I mean, really, if you can’t get it across directly, you probably can’t get it across.

this pen does not write.
it spits at unwanted moments!
Out, into the trash!

The three that follow reach back a ways, yet each reappears in my reflection now and again.

slow thaw, mists thicken
snow mass, quiet puddling
darkness – skunks emerge

How can I share the recurring moment? Spring is in the air but the great piles of snow that the plows have made, they are melting and giving off mists and puddles. Mists rise from them but also, and inevitably, there is a smell, a smell of skunks – and it comes from the fact that at such a time of year skunks also emerge from wherever they have been for the winter. These phenomena as so closely tied. Any magical realist would suspect a causal link, and surely, since skunks emerging cannot have retroactively produced piles of melting snow, it must be, it must essentially be, that melting piles of snow produce skunks. Post hoc ergo propter hoc! Squeal with the delight of insight! Ahegm. Yet still, when I see the mist and my feet are wet in the puddle and I smell the smell, I remember how hard it is to capture and share the truth.

I’ve taken my swings.
Now I behold the diamond,
empty in the sun

This one, desperately imperfect and personal, accepts the passing of my father. To have taken ones swings, in baseball talk, is to have had ones turn, to be done. Baseball was his passion and main metaphor. Being done, one might look at the empty field (a diamond), to reflect. Lo, it is empty. but here my imagination jumps, and I think of the emptiness of which Buddhist speak, emptiness as a feature of Reality which cannot be understood as a concept, nor can it be described in words. I think of being done and trying to understand what it is that has been done. I feel close to beholding a diamond. I am thankful for the warmth of the sun. As a haiku this is probably unintelligible, but at least as a personal reflection, it comes back to me.

As this tree rises
unquestioning to the sun
may I also rise

It’s a deep thing that I notice in trees, how it is that over the years they reach (towards the sun, toward some actualization of possibility, towards destiny), and how they reach at each moment, breathing the air and gathering water and nutrition from the earth, growing, how it is utterly unquestioning, this actualization. Utterly.

Good Morning dear reader. May you as well rise without question.