180/365

Seventeen days of rain
unending gray skies
only 23 days left
to gather gopher wood.

105/365

It's 39° this Sunday morning. Frost warning walks through early morning city. I'm playing my iPod through my tape player; there are actually some tunes on the Pod I don't have on CD. Right now, listening to Steely Dan's "Deacon Blues".

I'm preparing to travel. I bought the Cassette Adapter for MP3 Players so I could share new tunes with Brother Dave, who I will see by Wednesday.

It's all so much up in the air. I might leave Tuesday afternoon. I might leave Tuesday after work. I might leave Wednesday morning. At worst, I would leave Wednesday after work.

Why is it so much up in the air? I support researchers in submitting grant applications, and there is a grant due on Wednesday. Although the researcher seems amenable to submitting the grant as early as Monday or Tuesday, he keeps asking for reassurance that the due date is Wednesday. So, I get a mixed signal.

But I'm hopeful. It's possible the grant will be submitted my Tuesday morning, and I could take off as early as noon the same day.

I expect to have pictures to share when I return.

27/365

Text reads:

Brother wolf, look!
Sister rabbit
studies shadows
in freshly fallen snow.

See full-size version of this card

I recently received a pack of blank note cards from Defenders of Wildlife which had various wolf pictures on the front. I sent this card, with the original version of the poem written inside, to Brother Dave.

Jack Kerouac would have called something like this poetic form an "American Haiku". I call it "automatic poetry" (as in, "automatic writing", cf. Wm B. Yeats) or a "postcard poem". I see this as an application of William Stafford's "poem a day" discipline.

According to Reverend Mother, "It is reported that when William Stafford was asked how he was able to write a poem every day, he said, 'I lowered my standards.'"

So, I write a postcard poem as if the words cannot be changed. No previous draft, no edits. Scribble away, then send it off to your wondering (or wonderful) correspondent.

I have "cheated", in that the version of the poem above is slightly altered from the original. OTOH, how can I cheat when I'm the one making the rules?