Five Branch Tree




  • Spring Haiku- 2013



    still waiting to bloom,
    a late spring understanding
    last year?s winter



    green grass above
    the silent water 
    of yesterday?s rain





    protests outside the courthouse-
    slowly the flood waters
    continue a steady rise






    hung from a taught pulley,
    bound sacks of mortar mix
    revolve in hard urban air





    momma robin?s belly
    cupped deep into her nest-
    the world as a single eye






    Cry of a Newborn-
    Oh the Cruelty of April!







    new grads, more art shows,
    but one distantly played cello--
    best that can be hoped for




    Stepping off the porch,
    a whiff of decay  
    will carry over into June 





    Sudden warm rain,
    hard grip on a wheelbarrow--
    more mud for the garden






    new depth of sky
    seen through the scent
    of white blossoms





    all these birds
    in this wind
    with the children








    *FBT will be back up with regular posts in early June.









  • Everything
    --Fanny Howe (2011) 
    Infinite nesting
    pushes all matter
    towards emptiness:
    child-nodes,
    tree-droppings
    with a root element of null.
    None is always included
    in every cluster
    of children. 
    Nothing in nothing
    prepares us. 
    Yet a fresh light was shed
    on immortality
    for me climbing the stairs
    firm foot first. 
    Everything was in the banister:
    crows on branches, crickets,
    architects, handsaws and democrats.
    Red moon at 3 AM.




    *Postings from 05/14 and 5/16 taken from Howe's 2003 collection 
      of literary essays, "The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life".






  • [A Blue Vase; Pablo Picasso, 1903]...............





  • ...in some way the future and God invite thoughts of collapse, the end of the self. The end of words. The future has the look of a nameless expanse. The past is either trapped in the individuated body like water in a rag, or else both past and present are acts of shucking, removing, discarding the gravity of the world's givens as one enters a freer, lighter economy of space. One could think of the material world as something like an air that one runs through at high speed, in order to get past it. This thought would reverse the usual sense of being as being stuck in a body moving along with time. 
    Just as music leaves itself behind, and words have to be spoken in order to effect their disappearance, one can catch a glimmer of a life itself being a glad renunciation of itself. 
    --Fanny Howe










  • The taste and smell of an action, any action, comes from its objective. This is the strange thing about relationship. What you desire is what creates quality. You are not made by yourself, but by the thing that you want. It is that sense of a mutually seductive world that an itinerant life provides. Because you are always watching and entering, your interest in fixtures grows weary and your strongest tie is the the stuff off to the side traveling with you. 
    --Fanny Howe




    The serious reflection is composed
    Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace.
    Wallace Stevens