What do birdwatching and haiku have in common?
They’re both arts of the ephemeral. The fleeting. The caught glimpse from which so much else must be inferred. If a warbler lingers for a few minutes in my burr oak tree while on its migration path, I have to act quickly. I have to see the bird. Grab my binoculars. Rush outside with my field guide. Hope the bird is still there. And then I have to try to discern those telltale markings that differentiate that bird from other warblers. Are there eye rings, wing bars, darker outer feathers, a rusty bib, a black cap? From those details, I can, sometimes, make an identification. In haiku, as in all poetry, there’s the desire for similar extrapolation: what can this image or metaphor reveal? What will this detail suggest about the wider world? So I mean to write about birds, sure, but also about the birdwatcher, about the world we share with birds, which is subject to so many other forces. You live on a farm in a rural Ohio. Are all the haiku in this book about birds you commonly see in your
