Catching a Cranefly: linked verses
just one drink catching a cranefly in mid-air
how many months now since I’ve held someone
missing you the morning after a hard frost
breath measured out in small white clouds
buzzing what the rattlesnake sees in infrared
ah just to touch that velvety skin
floating leaves the fetal curl that makes a good craft
trapped in transit with whatever’s going ’round
migrants a Japanese barberry trembling with sparrows
will the circle in fact be unbroken
mountain path I step aside to let a caterpillar pass
in the trail register box an empty bottle
just one drink…
This began as three tanka jotted down in the Notes app while I sat out in the woods, and snowballed from there. While haiku-writing culture prizes Zen-like objectivity, tanka are traditionally more open to the overt or side-long expression of deep emotion. This persisted even as I broke the tanka apart into a short linked-verse sequence, which I’d call a renku except that it wasn’t composed by a small group, just me. But as in renku, each pair of adjacent stanzas may be read as one verse.