Lifelong Renga: Autumn 25
It’s proven difficult to keep up with a daily practice of writing this ‘lifelong’ project, not because of production - I do more or less write something every day - but because dailiness itself applies a slightly different pressure to the usual gap between producing creative work and processing it. ‘Normally’ I write as and when and edit to the same extended schedule - often considerably extended. Not so with this.
Novelists of course have a quite different and more dynamic relationship between daily production and editing, so it’s indicative of quite how disorganised I am that I experience difficulty when only working with a tanka’s worth per diem - 5 lines of text being added to a unit of, customarily, 100 lines in total. This renga is a case in point, being at one point 30 verses long (150 lines) because the ‘season’ didn’t quite divide as neatly as I supposed it would.
I’ve appended the excess verses to indicate how they imbalanced the renga’s 4/12/4 structure, being 8 at the start and 2 at the end. This is partly to be ‘completist’ and partly because the point of this project, for me at least, is to explore what impact ephemerality (a daily writing practice), whether as poet or as editor, has on my sensibility. Which is in the category of Big Vague Words, but let’s see if, through this project, I can come up with a better one.
(I mean ‘daily writing practice’ here in a slightly different sense from journal writing or Daily Pages as writing for oneself, in that - as in this post - I’m intending this work to be outward-facing, however limited the readership.)
eats its northern hemisphere.
on the back of old tickets:
Once legion, now nigh extinct,
he falls from my old papers.
to meet an old pal translates
their north to our south.
The road undulates up, till
wind turbines rise from the mist.
Sitting on the autumn trees,
cloud the colour of their leaves.
Carter Bar plunge into mist
viewed from the Yellow Mountains.
Beyond them sits the North Sea.
its wisp of cloud at one glance,
Abbey, toun, and auld hotel,
let you keek into your past.
Victorian prints of clansmen
slouches like the teenage me.
fast in Timex: black pudding
that summer job, decades back,
now served in the Proust Canteen.
clouds behind trees behind
Pale leaves on a dark lawn:
High, fenced-in, mid-slope,
thorned about, an apple tree,
Who gathers fruit that’s neither
drag a cold sun behind them
On the river path: a comb
and a brick that says ‘Lochside’.
his golf cart home from the range
and he’s a young dad, trying
to get his bairnie to sleep.
on each of his calves one verse
Robin on the train track flies
up and down but not away.
seaweed rocks then grey to half-
The train glances then it’s back
to our screens’ vanishing points.
of fallen leaves plastic and
Birch leaves, yellow as cornflakes,
fill the garden’s morning bowl.
