Listening

Listening with the animals the silences hunted hearing this waking the animals enter myth-time do their magic emerge changed a whimper a lawnmower whirr a laugh gift and forgift animal appearance in profile in disappearance outlining the shadow dance and the heart of who you are — viewer of this world becoming.

ABOVE 

Details above of four new outdoor murals. These expansive artworks unfold through time — please do visit, rest in place, listen.

— Mural by Esteban Camacho Steffensen. Willamette at 27th, north wall of Arriving By Bike, sponsored by 350Eugene.

— Mural by Susan Applegate and associates including Kalapuya elder and consultant Esther Stutzman. Westmoreland Park, east wall of the Dr. Edwin Coleman, Jr. Community Center.

— Mural by Kari Johnson. Lane Community College, east wall of the Center Building. (Also, detail below.)

— Mural by Ila Rose. College Hill, Eugene, south wall of a private residence.

We are all here to serve each other. At some point, we have to understand that we do not need to carry a story that is unbearable. We can observe the story, which is mental; feel the story, which is physical; let the story go, which is emotional; then forgive the story, which is spiritual, after which we use the materials of it to build a house of knowledge.

— Joy Harjo, in Poet Warrior: A Memoir (2021)

Bears are amused by the concept of reality. They sit around imagining they are real, and they laugh.

— N. Scott Momaday, The dark amusement of bears, a poem in Dream Drawings: Configurations of a Timeless Kind (2022)

Future is Now (And Then)

And We Are (Prepared)

An Aspect of Desire (Sky's Limit) 

The Bed Of Rest (Thermal Blanket)

The Hope of Leaves (The Grasp)

Waiting In The Wings (The Red Dress)

Whistling Down The Tracks (Vanishing Lines) 

Earth Spirit Rising (The Embrace)

Every Journey Begins (One Step)

Concrete Lust of Rebar (The Yearning)

Shelter in Place (Now Leasing)

Like, There Is No Tomorrow (What's Not To Like)

Occupying Sacred Ground (The Thinker)

And what have you to say about these flowers
late in the season, so desperate and calm.
The whine of hope perishes
in time, just in time, for the jackhammers
to build an emblem science, and the small figures
to move in its midst, like so many futures.

-- Ann Lauterbach, from her poem Lines of Flight in Or To Begin Again (2009)

PHOTOS: Election Week, November 2022

A Downtown Near You (Whats New?)

Click to Enlarge (If You Dare)

VEXICON: In A Word

We roll on wheels of words and dreams.

- N. Scott Momaday, from his poem In The Telling

A freeway overpass crossing the river.

Painted over in hopeless gray within days.

Please Do Not Pick my Sunflowers ... 

Ukraine's State Flower...

Love and Resistance. Turmoil and clarity. Freedom and hope. ... and don't pick the flowers....  

Eugene Oregon Summer-to-Autumn 2022. 

EVERMORE, as seen/scene in Seasons 1-5 of VEXICON: 

VEXICON 5: MAY DAY. May 1 2022

https://tobecomevisible.blogspot.com/2022/05/vexicon-2022-may-day.html

VEXICON 4: Desire Anyway. December 31 2021

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/12/vexicon-4-desire-anyway.html

VEXICON 3: Loves & Forebodings. July 2 2021

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/07/vexicon-2021-loves-forebodings.html

VEXICON 2: Signs as signs as signals. January 25, 2021

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/01/vexicon-2-signs-as-signs-as-signals.html

VEXICON:  Signs of the Times 2020. October 9, 2020

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2020/10/vexicon-signs-of-times.html

WORDS WITHOUT BORDERS Productions. Open Source 24/7.

QUATRAIN

In my solitude

I have seen very clearly

things that are not true.

 — Antonio Machado

Full zero rising beginning end every thing in between

True gravity bathing pink contained gray yielding

Origin of the known universe unknown unborn the other

Attending yang honoring yin space tension grace

Images and notations, a morning walk downtown, October 17.

...

There is no city

But the city within.

No door, but the door

To simple wisdom.

We walk, dumb

As newborns

Into the tremendous and endless

Blessing.

 — Cynthia Cruz, from her remarkable poem The Hinge, in How The End Begins (2016).

Then and Then and Gone

Suspish appearing Winter 2020-2021

Summer 2021 Suspish repainted

Fall 2021 fishy gobbled up?  

Sharkies prevail, conjured by Suspish, a happy family?

September 2022, Sharks - wow - in place for a year;

here two hearts added!

October 2022, the puritanical powers who rule

with fog-gray wash eliminate Suspishous Sharks.

But... for how long?

On the banks of the Amazon, a tributary flowing from the south hills of Eugene to its confluence -- not as one would expect with the Willamette (Whilamut) River -- with the Long Tom River and Coyote Creek. The original marshlands, now dammed by Army Corps of Engineers as Fern Ridge Reservoir. Then, flow pulled by gravity, turning and finding the way north to an eventual mating with the Willamette, then north to the Columbia, then to the sea -- the maternal Pacific -- where all is embraced, dissolved, reincarnated as bright-turquoised insistent beings, swimming upstream to spawn.  

Remember: Suspish may be an artist imaginary -- but the teeth are real.

Further... Feature story about Suspish in Eugene Weekly, July 2022

Silencing shadows

you withdraw from the names

that spin the silence of things

—Alejandra Pizarnik

shadow singing silence

shadow longing eyes as I

shadow spawning iron bone foam

shadow chaining gaze totemic

shadow forgiving ironblack

shadow receding fabric of time

shadow kissing infinite light

now

at this innocent hour

I and the one I was sit together

at the threshold of my gaze

NOTES

—Two poems by Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972); poems XXVIII and XI in Diana’s Tree (Árbol de Diana) (1962), trans. Anna Deeny

—Photos and captions, an hour downtown driftwalk, Douglas Beauchamp