Author: Rae Spencer

Feeling Loss

Rae Spencer3 Comments

Feeling Loss

It might feel cold

Like the open ocean
Where cold rays
Cast their semen and eggs
Into vast seas
And do no pause to dwell
On species
Or the fate of genes

Or any other clutch
Of dry, reptilian lust
Chemical attractants
And the scrape of scale
Need coiled around instinct
Cold fusion
Where there is no heat

Or it might feel empty

Absence of weight and form
A floating motion
Without memory of soaring
Brief puff of spore
All conceivable futures
Condensed
Into a mote of dust

Arms closing around air
In blank embrace
Filled with empty memory
A boundless sigh
As the ghost of passion
Slips away
Upon the changing tide

Photos taken at the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center

Transitions

Rae Spencer6 Comments

Transitions

Could it be considered
A kind of death
This melting of ice

This shape in a mold
Quickened by heat
Into liquid escape

Subject to weight
The fast run downhill
The settle and seep

And inevitable peril
Of dying again
As vaporous mist

Moist, like a breath
And betrayed
By the coming cold

Norfolk Botanical Garden

Rae Spencer6 Comments

A stroll through the archives brings back a beautiful afternoon at Norfolk Botanical Garden. Photos taken June 2011.

More Nests

Rae Spencer5 Comments

The blue jays have retired to their nest next door, abandoning the yard to robins and rabbits. Both seem satisfied to stay a while. The robins are building a nest in the pear tree, and the rabbits have excavated a series of test-nests. I’m ridiculously excited, almost giddy with anticipation…

Analog and Digital

Rae Spencer4 Comments

I can’t deny that compact discs store easy and play pretty. Their studio-fresh tracks sound eternally new, scrubbed free of noise. Perhaps this is why I prefer vinyl records, because I’m not a tremendous fan of “new”. I like the hiss and pops of dusty wear. I like the way albums feel, the balanced weight of them. I like centering them on the turntable, pushing the start button, then listening for the click and whirr of motors as the tonearm levitates into place. The loud half-scratch of initial contact. A few seconds of fuzzy anticipation, then warm, full music.

It’s still magic, to me, how sound was trapped in those spiral grooves. How it stayed there, unchanged, during years of transport from home to college to apartment to duplex to home-of-our-own. How it reverberates–ringing off the vinyl, through the needle, and into a set of speakers that harmonize, that wail and thump. How it fills my house with acoustic contentment and electric excitement, with voices from my youthful years. I wouldn’t live those spent decades again, but it’s nice to hear such vibrant ghosts, singing their distant songs once more.

And it’s nice to preserve my ghosts on these modern discs and silicon chips, even if part of their warmth is lost in the process.