694.
Dim white-winter Sun,
I remember the deep snows
Of Alsace-Lorraine.
Tag: winter
Haiku #692
692.
January fog.
A canine is constantly
Pacing long-lawn frost.
Haiku #690
690.
Even the muddiest
Up-dug, bramble-bogged garden
Is made pure by frost.
Forest Lodge
The past is a lonely huntsman
Walking on shards of ice,
Those sharper endings present,
How winter ways entice.
I found a dampening cabin
Beyond that gated path;
I couldn’t explain what happened;
I could not find a start.
But whatever you might imagine,
The truth would bruise your heart,
The curtains dank in ambers,
Shelves all empty and dark.
A sign above the doorway,
Inscriptions fading in moss,
I read my name spelt backwards
And woke into my loss.
Aphelion
Snow falling on the sea,
I noticed how snowflakes floated awhile
And then we disappeared.
Somewhere out there is Sun,
But sunlight is not for everyone
Down here.
The lathered cabesters returning
And a chacking huer’s thirsty
As he conducts the fairmaids home.
How beautiful the ocean
If only from a skiff,
How beautiful the drop
If only from a cliff,
How beautiful the missing
If only we may live.
Somewhere out there is Moon;
Aphelion wilderness
With a little less gloom.
N.B Lathered, Cabester, Chacking and Huer are words from Cornish dialect. Fairmades or Fairmaids is an old Cornish word for pilchards.
Lake Of The Woods
What was the time in Ottawa
When that boy ran full pelt
Towards a delapidated pier upon
An icy lake to make his shape
Where conifers colluded
And memory occluded
This day, it once occurred.
Plenty (or was it a few) anglers
In lumberjack furs
Dangling their lines
In holes through snow
As they blow in their hands
And distances blur
Between water and skies
For hope of a bite
Oblivious to that parabolic
Arc of his last jump, his leap,
Neap tide, a void of pride,
The police had never been so far
From the scene of his crime,
But you can’t pursue spirit
With a Horseman in Time.
Something, always, is lost
Between the old and the new,
Between a thought in sheets
And all written words, Love.
One day I’ll remember this,
Sipping my oxtail soup,
Inconvenience, true,
Tired, yes, and mute.
After All
Under margrave groves
Of peach blossom trees
There flows the falls
Of a winding creek,
Their blossoms’ aromas
Are mild and are meek,
But those torrents below
Are baleful and bleak.
My iris-blown beard
Diurnal and straw,
But under my chin
Eternal tears pool.
Snowfall cloaking
After all,
But when the snow melts
(If not long before),
Those bodies revealed,
Their mortal hands hold
The one different future,
Distant and cold.
Canescence
Dog chasing fox,
Caught in a headlock
Between igneous rock
And a dry river pass
Saturnine feelings
Fall to your palm:
Snowflakes mounting,
Mandrakes routing,
Meteor showers
Hour by hour
In a green looking-glass.
Dog-chasing foxes,
Sparkling quadrantids;
Fireworks cancelled,
And walks in the park.
Perihelion frost,
Your love is embossed
On my incandscently
Hoary heart.
I was dead to the world
Or rather
The world was dead to me.
Everything else was a case
Of sheer serendipity.
Passerine
To a fetlock’s height on unicorns
One Sunday morning you were born,
Weaned by a mother who hung her best dress
Beneath a seasoned turkey breast.
Snowdrift, westward, soon apart,
No sewing kit stitches a cold broken heart.
A blue tit warbling I once heard
On the crooked, downhill turf;
Later, I could not account to myself
For blood on my fingers,
Five or six feathers in my heart
And other forms of Cubist art;
Blue eye of my needle
Where the downy snow starts,
Returning home,
Her song in my chest,
To an empty bath.
Haiku #684
684.
Undergound, ants dream.
Frost on the heath, and some snow.
Through winter we sleep.
