slow-flowing sap, rise
and bedeck reluctant twigs.
Mute passion runs deep.
One thing I like about poetry in general and haiku in particular is that it’s useful to talk about things which no one but the poet understands. I often feel that way reading Mary Oliver; something must have sparked that MOMENT for her, and she writes something which nevertheless appeals to the reader and touches them deeply, but we – poet and reader – have two very different experiences going on. I guess it’s that way for all writing; the reader/writer interaction is never the same.
Mmmmm. Love your haiku. But then I love a good smolder. 🙂
I now need to use that word in a haiku… but really, that’s what this one is all about – the smoldering. 😉
Nice! Oliver has said, regarding her notebook entries, that she often doesn’t fully understand the where/why/what of a thought that comes to her, but that she writes it down precisely as it enters her head, just to capture that “moment.” Sometimes these phrases won’t find their way into poems until years later. More evidence of how important it is to write things down immediately before they’re lost.
But what you say is true — there’s the poet’s experience while writing the poem vs. the reader’s experience “interpreting” it.
I laughed reading a piece from Diana Wynne Jones on the Greenwillow Blog the other day about how she wrote the first chapter of a book and put it aside and had no idea, years later, what she was going to say/do next in it – nothing was written down.
::sigh::
CLEARLY I need more notebooks.