Hodgepodge 364/365 - Fever

I had in mind something more ambitious than what I am about to post, but as I watch my temperature continue to climb (100.2, 100.8, and now . . . ☞), and as I realize that all I really want to do is lie on the couch under my comfy fleece blanket, my dog at my feet, and not think about anything, maybe just snooze some more, I am willing to toss ambition out the window.

Tomorrow, I will try to summon my forces for some sort of a suitable sendoff as I bid adieu to this second and final 365 blog (really: never again!). But for now, here are a few haiku (loose) that I discovered yesterday—from a class a few years ago with Washington state poet Sarah Zale—as I cleaned out my mailboxes, on another dead day at the Napa Red Cross Service Center.

I find that every time I stumble on old poems, I continue to work them and work them. It's so hard to get them "right." I've tweaked these, and they still strike me as clumsy. I may well tweak them again, next time I visit this page.

So I will say this, regarding ambitions: in whatever I decide to do for my next "365"—because yes, I've become rather addicted to the discipline of something creative every day, and to accountability of some sort—I am going to try to fit poetry in. I may start by reading Edward Hirsch's How to Read a Poem.

Anyway, here are those haiku (loose): 

Sparrows jostle finches,
clamoring; oak tit
waits, tilted
on dry stalk.

Feet crunch over
mat of buckeye leaves—
poison oak glowing red.

Egret balances rapt—
lightning stab,
fish flails . . .
rippling rings of water.

Notebooks filled with scrawls:
quotes, to-do-lists, memories—
thirty-four years gone.

final entry
in stained journal—
gray day