SEEING RED

The past tense of a fire is fire.
The future tense of ash is ash.
                       —Miriam Sagan (from Prayer Flag)

Gertrude 2020-2024      Mural by Bayne

Beware the Power in the Grid

Arctic Vortext

Abstract Composition in Red Minor

Only Fear Fear Itself

Truth Be Devoling... erased by EWEB the next day

You're not ALONE... so, where are You?

The Journey begins with the first step

DeLuxe! Available Now

Ask Not for Whom They Toil

Time/Space is where they find you  --Kokopelli

Our Lady of the Heart of Sorrow

LiveFastDieFree

Who Do You Trust

 

It's difficult to understand the nature of reality when you stand with one foot in a vanished world and the other in chaos. —Ashley Shelby, Muri (2019)

Nameless

Maybe the whole world is absentminded or floating.

—Simone Muench 

Photos: Nameless remains after all the losings and findings; touch and care slip away as the wayward moves on. -DB

 

Simone Muench in Wolf Centos (2014 Sarabande Books):

I saw my life a wolf loping along the road—

a glint of bone, visible & then gone,

a landscape altered.

Ideas, hair, fingers

fall & come to naught.

A shirt blows across the field.

A shrug of stars as flowers go out on the sea.

Maybe the whole world is absentminded

or floating. The flower, the weather,

the room empties its mind of me,

the sea-pulse of my utterance.

I have stood for a long time

at the edge of a river, unknown, nameless,

hands groping for the shape of the animal.

Not knowing what all the music had been hiding.

E'scapes

When we go together, what is the simple form we make?
Who fits our edges snugly, composing a whole?
Whose eye searches the landscape for a focal point?
                                —Harryette Mullen

Streetscape

Darkscape

Eyescape

Roomscape

Xscape

Moonscape

Landscape

Dreamscape

Innerscape

NOscape

Sidescape

Wakescape

DEFINITION
1. A portion of territory which the eye can comprehend in a single view, including all the objects it contains.
2. A sociological aspect of a physical area.
3. A picture representing a real or imaginary scene.
4. A mode of framing, where the horizontal sides are longer than the vertical sides.
5. An oscillation of all of the above: E’scape.

NOTE
— Harryette Mullen, from the poem What Draws Us Together, in Poetry (Nov 2024)

CODA
Question and Answer in the Green Mountains

You ask me why I lived in the green mountains;
I laugh and don't answer — I’m at peace.
Peach blossoms on flowing water go into the distance.
There is another sky and earth not among men.
—Li Bai (701-762 Chinese, trans Arthur Sze)

HEAT

Does a leaf note change, sense acceleration, feel heat?
Before they fall. Aftermath?
To soak, bristle, crumble.
Homing on gravity.
Theory is easy for some.

2024: The hottest year on planet Earth in the last 125,000 years.

2024: The Universe is expanding faster than “previously” thought.
What were we thinking? The speed of light more or less?
Perhaps The Universe knows something we do not.

We the 8.2 Billion: Gesturing in an Abstract Reality.

In an hour-glass life-span how can one know?

8.2 Billion we humans, this blue-green tide-pool Earth.
Verbs run amok: Tackle, combat, battle. Nouns to fight abstract reality: Drought, Climate, Heat. Wildfire, Flood, Eruption.

Honing response to a savior edge.

Task: Image possibility within disjunction.
Between don't gaze ahead admonishment.
Among don't zero-in close astonishment.

While riding acceleration in don't look back obedience.

Task: Grasp tangentials. Occupy interstices. Qualify conclusions. Image when our wavering invention — the ancient soundings known as Words — betray.

Task: Image the global situation, temporal duration, a scale of immediate now-time. Then, how to imagine 8.2 Billion desiring humans in their each and every moment?

As gesture. As phantom. As fragment. As ambiguity. As absence. 

As leaf.

That's how.

 

A wider range of words exist to describe effects of cold than heat.

— Karen Solie from her poem Orion, London Review of Books, Dec2024

Life Is Enormous

Life is enormous, you only have
to drill a tunnel through one of the hemispheres
to discover freedom in the other.
But never forget - there's taiga all around.
    —Anzhelina Polonskaya

—Photos by DB, as encountered during walkabouts, Eugene OR 2024.  Outside of these isolated, framed moments, each person moved in their individual befores-and-afters with intent or by circumstance, with hope and longing. As did the photographer.  This "outside" ever larger than the picture.  Life is Enormous.

—Poem by Anzhelina Polonskaya, in To The Ashes (2019 trans Russian by Andrew Wachtel. Polonskaya was born near Moscow, lives in Germany, her poetry is banned in Russia.)

Taiga

The sea darkens outside

and gradually becomes the taiga,

irrational, trackless.

Having run the impassible gauntlet

you shrug your shoulders, like a prisoner,

holding your bundle to your chest with one hand,

still smiling innocently at the sun.

Life is enormous, you only have

to drill a tunnel through one of the hemispheres

to discover freedom in the other.

But never forget - there's taiga all around.