Springwater
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTaN2X_25Mg
You remember how I posted a few weeks back about “how my heart moves“? Well… if that was the deep unseen motion of an aquifer, this past week I’ve felt the sudden rushing of spring mountain streams. It’s all very interesting, and delightful, to experience. So I wrote a few poems, and a few more, and a few more, and now have recorded an extended piece, “Springwater,” that’s composed of six haiku I wrote this afternoon. You can go watch it, of course, on YouTube. Enjoy!
In writing Springwater, I was attempting to invoke the poetic forms not only of the haiku, but also of the villanelle and the pantoum, both of which are old favorites of mine. After the second haiku, I thought about doing this as a sestina of haiku, but that seemed like it might be a bit over-the-top – and it might make the waters of the poem seem more unified than they should right now appear to be. I chose the forms I did because I wanted to create a sense of echoing complementarity between the two forms of water. As to the meaning of the mountain lion – ask the mountain stream!