The yard is fully awake, roused by brilliant sunshine. Every stem stirs, an audible creak and rustle, and the breeze feels like a contented yawn. I’m tempted to use the word “spring” again…
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Today is one of those days. An achy, sleepy, over-tired day of necessary errands and unnecessary complications. An unoriginal day, tiresomely mundane. Unread books murmur from every shelf, unfinished taxes whisper anxiety, and unwalked trails sing a muddy siren song that I have no time to heed.
It’s a day to cover my ears, charge the camera’s batteries, and visit the archives. Here’s a photo from May 2010, one of my all-time favorites.
It finally occurred to me, while taking these pictures, that I approach photography and writing from the same impulse. Every time I pick up my camera, pen, or laptop, I’m trying to tell a story. Or, at the very least, share an impression. And it always starts with noticing something. Today, I noticed a visitor “hiding” in the irises.
But how will I frame this story? Should I reveal its secret from the outset? Because the rabbit was not so well-hidden as it might seem, though I could gloss over that fact by photographing it at just the right angle, by restricting my point of view. A few steps to either side, and this particular story shifts from drama to comedy.
It’s an appealing metaphor, as I find words to be as quick and slippery as rabbits. I often end up holding a tuft of fluff, frustrated by the knowledge that something warm and alive has escaped my grasp.
Keeping House
I drifted all day
From stanza to stanza
Keeping house
The laundry sloshed and spun
A swirl of blues and grays
While I sorted and folded
The dry remains
Of yesterday
And I polished layers of dust
Into a desolate sonnet
Praising sloth
I translated the kitchen
Wrote its peculiar vocabulary of spice
Into cryptic recipes
And tilting volumes of scent
Then vacuumed the office
Where spines decayed to anonymous
Motes and filled the air
With sneezes
While in the bathroom sink
A single gray hair mocked
Recalled an absent metaphor
Each room and stanza resisted order
With all the hidden power of entropy
The secret law that governs socks
And salt and hungry ants
And these curls of shredded poems
That speak of duty
Rites and arcane lore
Kept in the rooms of my house
Published in Menagerie June 2010
What am I
When I’m spinning?
A giddy earthen child
Hair and hands in orbit
All my brilliant paths described
By Riemann’s rumpled planes
When dizzy, I collapse in grass
Yearn toward the evening moon
Enchanted by its gibbous rise
Its constant tide-locked face
Tugs the sea and me alike
The atoms of our mass
Bound ebb to flow, neap to high
By Newton’s Principia
While Schrödinger’s wistful cat
Waits in later pages
Unknown as yet, and left to pace
In undetermined fate
What am I
When I’m sleeping?
A prism child of night
Splintered into photon dreams
Cradled in hot nebulae
And scattered throughout space
A bleak and cold infinitude
Some billion other worlds
Suspended around other stars
In beginning states of grace
Unseen, like ore in deep, hot veins
Compressed beneath the ages
Until revealed by algorithm
And captured in equation
With Schrödinger’s hapless cat
Purring at my side
Alive and dead, unrealized
An enigma in time’s keeping
