still, if stiff, trees - the river ever gliding; which to mimic?
River in Autumn [Haiku]
1
Thick clouds scrape over the ridge. In the foreground, sun-fired sands shine brightly, but the mountain behind has fallen dark, as if it's being marched over by the waves of a ghost army -- formless battalions that block the light. When that marching army reaches the nearer mountain, it will neither stop nor slow, but will crawl overland, coming ever nearer. the fore mountain shines, even as a ghost army closes from behind
Subsequent ridges fade into shapes, darker and less distinct. The farther down the lake one looks, the lower the clouds hang, until they obscure all trace of the apparent infinity of ridges. In front of the one sun-warmed wall of mountain, two rainbows arch skyward, disappearing into the clouds. One is a weak echo of the other. My Irish mind imagines the arc-segments are full semi-circles -- pot-o-gold, and all that. But the weak one seems to quit before it even reaches the cloud, and thus makes me wonder if rainbows are real, and - if they are - is the weak one as real as the bright one. double rainbow arches up from the lake, stoking pondering

the elephant
they said was on a rampage
just had a bad toothache

geometries dice a smooth world into prismatic chunks

the tree reaches,
drunkenly meandering
in search of light
In a quiet valley, terraced rice paddies lie flooded but unsprouted, their glassy surfaces vaguely mirror the sky above. More than the narrow dykes, it's the mere inches of elevational difference that gives each irregular patch of water a distinct appearance. Each one is hit by light from the same distant source, and though they are as close to equidistant from that source as imaginable, each tells its own story in hue and glint. Amid the paddies, squat supply shacks pose as an inhospitable village -- all moat, no yard, and unneighborly distances between them. And yet there is something quaintly soothing about this fiction of a village. squat shacks stand, islands amid paddies -- a faux village
The cone-hatted ladies converge on the plantation, a spreading swarm, picking the fresh green leaves, tossing them over the shoulder into a backpacked wicker basket, leaving behind a flattop trimmed tea shrub. The mid-day rains drive away the pickers for a short time, but they'll be back, squeezing between dripping tea trees, their skirts saturated with the cold morning rain that will steam off into a muggy afternoon. tea pickers head back to the fields after mid-day rains