Winter Trees

Twenty-two videohaiku with texts prompted by the footage and existing in dialogue with it, made between January 10-March 3 2019. See Via Negativa for process notes. I also blogged some thoughts on the relationship between haiku and videopoetry.

These are best experienced as they unfold, scroll-like, in the video series, but here’s a transcription of the texts for the visually impaired:

winter trees
the hobo is missing
one of his fingers

January
the shrinking circle
of my needs

cold snap
the one-take tune I make
breaking icicles

snowflakes
on my bald head
tapping woodpecker

subnivean
I tunnel through the day
half awake

Groundhog Day
the former coal town living
off a shadow

cabin fever
today’s potato flaky
as old wood

meltwater pool
the way my reflection
keeps shivering

cold moon
of the month I was born
ass-first

space
between night-time snowflakes
for warp speed

walking the line
on both sides the same
light rime

ice form fits
each body
of water

a flutter of snowflakes
a flurry of snowbirds
an afterlife of seeds

as above
so below
the color of absence

Presidents’ Day—
to build a fire
any refuse will do

no dark side of the moon
where a Chinese probe
is growing plants

unplowed road
someday the mountain itself
will bury us

white-footed
the way my memory places
mouse tracks in snow

porcupine squeezing
through a deer fence seems
somehow proverbial

winter sun
hoisting all its bristles
into the treetops

spider on the snow
the granularity of land
underfoot

you dance with everything you’ve got
wind
trees