the clearness

Milk-drop Moon junction
Shadowless light lullaby
Fragile heart prism


photo of Moon and Venus
by Tavi Greiner 1-24-12

Five steps North, seven bread crumbs West, then five swift paces Southwest leads you to 'recuerda mi corazon,' exclusive home of
Haiku My Heart

scarf

She walked away, I ran after her, caught up her hand in mine. We looked at one another. She was laughing then. I took out the stealth sleek camera from inside my coat and she wasn't smiling then. She said: "Look, if you want to photograph the scarf, I'll pose". Others had sought the illusive black and white misty silk, and my heart pounded and hand trembled as she opened her coat revealing the infamous neck decoration like a flasher. She blushed furiously.

Her mother entrusted the scarf to her in a simple ceremony in the hour before the plane went wheels up for Cannes. It was her dead grandmothers. They were both crying. The plane was delayed. On page 114 of an old art book at the New York City library there's a photograph of Picasso blowing his three nostrils into it. I don't think he was crying though. During the war, Mussolini had presented it in a shallow white box under layers of tissue paper to an unimpressed mistress. An embittered servant noted this and whispered it to a thousand other servants. He was later decapitated. The Mistress gave it to a wrinkled old woman selling bruised cantaloupes out of a wheel barrow on a blazing hot street corner. The old woman covered her balding head and spat and cursed the presenter. I'm pretty sure Ezra Pound held it to his nosebleed once after being cold-cocked by Hemingway during a boxing lesson up in a tilting gray building with no heat. It was the closest rag available. Pound wrote that in a haiku, or maybe it was a mirror image of a poem.

She said, as my trembling got worse, and she, still posing as it started to rain: "Dear Granny found it at a roadside market in dear old Bellfontaine, Ohio, under six cracked jelly glasses. Dammit," she was furious now,"you come over and drop it from the edge of this fountain and I'll take the bloody photograph".
I'll never let go of her hand.

image: Ponytail by Last Exit

after the storm

In those last moments before dusk the Sun pierced through the darkened thick cover, washing the Western cream-white walls of the lighthouse lemon yellow. A Binocularless Quartermaster leaning on the deck miles away along the horizon could pinpoint course settings by the yellow blaze. Bees straight-lined their way to the metal trough below the extinguished lighthouse flame, embedding their stingers to reupholster the hive after a whirlwind day. The Keeper, climbing the wooden steps from the storm cellar with lantern in one hand and Bible in the other, took a deep breath of pristine sea air. All of his red and pink fenced-in begonias were gone. He would start his garden over at Sunrise, he thought. Dandelions waiting out the storm kept their distance, humbly stretching forward for a closer look.

Lighthouse Dandelions
by Jamie Wyeth

no nothing

No Cameras
No Dogs
No Skating
No Smoking. Except Eight Feet From Closest Exit And Fourteen Inches From The Curb And Six Feet From The Ceiling Facing West.
No Children. Positively.
No Talking
No Carry-Ons Larger Than Fourteen Inches By Nine Inches.
Keep Your Arms Folded
Not Those Hats. We Mean It. You Look Silly.

unpressed

She reached for all the wrong things when she had a choice. Especially men, the ache, she grimaced. She was over-dressed for the task in her unpressed apricot dress. The deception of pink heather swimming in the pasture unto swarms of purple clover masked the peaceful valley. There were the bees. Grasping for blossoms of dew to overflow her wicker they swarmed in single file, and she fell from the rotted gray splinter of a ladder into his arms. She was laughing as they ran, spilling the basket of perfumed pedals amongst all that buzzing.
On the wooden plank bridge her great-grandfather's slaves had built they stopped. They stood on aged wood with initials scrawled underneath that only the dead could decipher. He kissed her as she was out of breath and pleading to return. She shoved him over the rail with all her heart, splashing the unrequited soul head first into the green water, and she ran off to retrieve her basket. He stood up, emptied his hat and sea-shell ears admiring the ripples he created, and he could see the calm water farther down the brook never to be disturbed just like his heart.

Young Woman Picking the Fruit of Knowledge, 1892
by Mary Cassatt