we must look from its top

I have taken to walking through this landscape with a mental map that demands completion; the blanks are the outline of what I still need to know. In order to see our connection to the rest of the world, we have to know what lies between, and then look further, beyond the horizon. If there is a hill in front of us, we must look from its top. All of these imperatives would be frightening if they came from outside; coming from within, the dictatorship of geography becomes a means of self-knowledge of not only who we are but where we belong.

-- Ron Matous "Among These Mountains" Parabola 18:2

Ron Matous

Thanksgiving Table

At the head, my grandfather,
the sharp protrusions of his elbows
taking too much room; my brother
kicking the table leg, as if
a faster beat could speed up time;
my mother, wan-faced from her vigil
over pots; grandma muttering
rude asides under her breath;
and the space beside me
where my father
                             used to sit,
close to the kitchen door, so that he
could lean far back in his chair
to fit us in his camera's frame.
All of us, the plates, cups, cornbread,
turkey steeped in all its trimmings,
even the dog, held upright, squirming
had its place. All that he loved,
compressed. He held that camera
like a sleeping child;
it gained weight in his palm, became
a measure of what one man's life
can hold,
                and then let fall. The years
slide under us, but this day hangs
frozen: the table stacked with food,
our smiles opening
toward him like hands.

-- Ayelet Amittay

Adrift

Let my dream while I'm wide-awake
loose. Let me be drowned, baptized,
in the light given me. Day comes around,
night, fall, winter, spring,
summer. Leaves overhead, underfoot.
Waves arrive, buffets from friends
offended, enemies. Let it all come:
this is my way, this is the canoe I'm in.

-- William Stafford

pond|leaves

Place

On the last day of the world
I would want to plant a tree

what for
not for the fruit

the tree that bears the fruit
is not the one that was planted

I want the tree that stands
in the earth for the first time

with the sun already
going down

and the water
touching its roots

in the earth full of the dead
and the clouds passing

one by one
over its leaves

-- W.S. Merwin Migration

trees

track talk

'. . . But I'll tell you, Luśnia — here Wawera lowered his voice as if about to part with a secret — 'that there is also another thing that keeps me here. That it exists, I am sure, I can feel it deep in my breast. I just can't express it, can't put a name to it. But it's here, that thing, that strange reason.'

Luśnia was now looking at his friend with eyes wide open, his curiosity stirred.

'You mean now that it's not just this yearning-like for the trains?'

'No, no, that's something else. It's something that connects in me with that yearning but it exists beyond me, and without me, out of itself.'

'What's that, Wawera?'

'Shush. It's a secret. The secret of the dead run.'

They both fell silent, suddenly struck by a strange intangible fear, their eyes following the line into the already darkening mouth of the gully. In that bottomless silence of an August evening quiet but clear rustlings and murmurings began to waft towards them from the tracks: muffled lisps, fearful whispers, hollow knocks and clangs . . .

'Hear that?' the lineman broke the silence. 'Track talk . . .'

'Sure they often do of a summer evening. They shrink from the cold and so they clang.'

'Track talk,' repeated Wawera, ignoring the blacksmith's explanation. 'They talk in the evening, after the day's toil.'

'Track talk . . .' Luśnia echoed.

'Oh aye,' continued the lineman dreamily. 'Do you think they don't live like we humans do, like animals or trees?'

The blacksmith glanced at him quickly, surprised by the question.

'They do, Luśnia. They do. But they live their own lives, different to all the other creatures.'

That was a little too much for Luśnia's imagination. He looked at Wawera as at someone deranged, shook his head, spat from the corner of his mouth and moved a little to the right.

'And this line, do you think it doesn't live?' Wawera pressed on, goaded by Luśnia's passive resistance. 'And this gully, this station with the signal-box, this whole run?'

'It's a dead run,' dropped in Luśnia in a half-voice.

-- Stefan Grabiński "The Dead Run" (from In Sarah's House)
Tr. Wiesek Powaga

Stefan Grabiński

pond|reflection

under a shine

Bottomless water, heart's glass.
Each year the autumn comes that was not supposed to be
Back in the garden without language,
Each year, dead leaves like words
                                                            falling about our shoulders,
Each year, same words, same flash and gold guise.
So be it. The Angel of the Serpent That Never Arrives
Never arrives, the gates stay shut
                                                   under a shine and a timelessness.

-- Charles Wright, lines from "Via Negativa"

pond|ferns

becoming

Let us begin with what we now call water. We see it, as we suppose, solidifying into stones and earth, and again dissolving and evaporating into wind and air; air by combustion becomes fire, and fire in turn when extinguished and condenses takes the form of air again; air contracts and condenses into cloud and mist, and these when still more closely compacted become running water, which again turns into earth and stones. There is in fact a process of cyclical transformation.

-- Plato Timaeus and Critias
Tr. Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee

Timaeus and Critias

Oh Earth, Wait for Me

Return me, oh sun,
to my wild destiny,
rain of the ancient wood
bring me back the aroma and the swords
that fall from the sky,
the solitary peace of pasture and rock,
the damp at the river-margins,
the smell of the larch tree,
the wind alive like a heart
beating in the crowded reslessness
of the towering araucaria.

Earth, give me back your pure gifts,
the towers of silence which rose
from the solemnity of their roots.
I want to go back to being what I have not been,
and learn to go back from such deeps
that amongst all natural things
I could live or not live; it does not matter
to be one stone more, the dark stone,
the pure stone which the river bears away.

-- Pablo Neruda

untitled

two paths

Because the digging of the swimming hole was moving so fast and changes would be expensive, Maggie concentrated on shaping the water while I designed the Snail Mound. I had to give it this common name in order to communicate an unambiguous shape to Hastings' men, and to distinguish it from other shapes on which I would soon be working. The "Snail" drawings and models showed a double-curved ascent, two paths that only meet at the top and that lie at an angle.

In my mind were several different ideas . . . I thought of the most important shape behind life, the double helix of DNA. This has two spirals of ascent and they reminded me in turn of a utopian design of 1919 that had a diminishing spiral: Tatlin's tower. A wonderful quality of this is the way it illustrates the dance of history's surprising dialectic; it often proceeds in a counter rhythm, as two steps forward one step back, a progress in fits and starts, an ascent that has descent built into it. Another idea in the back of my mind was the 16th-century spiral stairway at Chambord which the French king, François I, had designed so that if he saw an unwelcome guest coming up one way, he could escape down the other. I would not understand the beauty of this until much later, when the mound was used in a way I had not foreseen: during a memorial service it separated those going up with flowers from those coming down empty handed.

-- Charles Jencks The Garden of Cosmic Speculation

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation

more pictures

Composer Michael Gandolfi on The Garden of Cosmic Speculation (interviewed by conductor Robert Spano)

with a sound but half its own

The everlasting universe of Things
Flows through the Mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings
Of waters,—with a sound but half its own,
Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
In the wild woods, among the Mountains lone,
Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, lines from "Mont Blanc"

Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni

Every scheme for the analysis of nature has to face these two facts, change and endurance. There is yet a third fact to be placed by it, eternality, I will call it. The mountain endures. But when after ages it has been worn away, it has gone. If a replica arises, it is yet a new mountain. A colour is eternal. It haunts time like a spirit. It comes and it goes. But where it comes, it is the same colour. It neither survives nor does it live. It appears when it is wanted. The mountain has to time and space a different relation from that which colour has.

-- Alfred North Whitehead Science and the Modern World

a certain way

Finding a gentleness in my pictures, that's about the highest compliment I've had. If my pictures help some people to see things in a certain way, it's probably to look at serious things non-seriously. Everything's serious. Everything's not serious.

-- Elliott Erwitt Elliott Erwitt

Elliott Erwitt

glass doorknob