The past tense of a fire is fire.
The future tense of ash is ash.
—Miriam Sagan (from Prayer Flag)
18 February 2025
SEEING RED
05 February 2025
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.
20 January 2025
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
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)