Author at Large
In my composition classes, I teach a section on photographs. We look at the different ways photographs convey meaning as well as composition. One of the topics is the intent of the photographer. Why did they frame the photo that way? Why did they choose that subject? What are they trying to reveal to you? …
The three dark colors, at first glance, stand as independent blocks. But stand and stare into the painting. Scan it as if looking for something you lost like your keys, your cellphone, or meaning in your life. The colors shift and fade and take on varying shapes as the mind tries to create order and …
Read More “On Seeing Black on Dark Sienna on Purple, Rothko, 1960”
The call of an elk startles me. I look across the rolling brown and gray hills at the sewing-machine bobbing of pumpjacks and feel the disappointment shiver me like touching steel on a hard frost morning. It’s the same feeling I get when I mistake the wind cutting through the wires for a whale’s song …
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The first fog of fall brings a chill with the scent of rain, of ichor, the blood of the gods, a mist that looks like a driving rain in the street lamps now switched on from clouded shadows. It catches me unaware, this feeling, as I open the door and the dog and cat run out like children …
What’s the use of Genesis without Revelation? But not the sudden springing of life from a breath or the sudden fury of an angry God, no. The long drawn out becoming over millions of years to bring us a flower that grows well in the margins of bulldozed lands and carved trails cut through suburban empires. And …
Read More “A Flower for the Post-Apocalypse — Photo and Poem”
A motorcycle wrecked in the carpool lane, just like when I’d driven my daughter and her boyfriend here three days ago. One hour and five minutes to go one mile. Time, though, makes all traffic pass, even if it’s over for some guy cutting between cars in so big a hurry it was worth never arriving. On …
He stands a shade bearing light. The blood of life in conjunction with the secondhand sunlight of the moon, Venus, and Jupiter as they spin along the ecliptic. The hum of distant electric lights sounds like his daughters in the far room with their dolls and stuffed animals arrayed for a celebration or on the daybed turned amphitheater as …
Your final morning in the field. Before sunup, in the dark the pump-jacks automatically pumping like thousands of hearts against the backdrop of stars sounds to you like the herds of elk you listened to in the forest waiting for first light years ago. You are alone in all that darkness as owls glide by and the coyotes shuffle …
We sit in the car, on a summer Saturday. The cranes are idle and the aircraft gone. For once, it feels alright to be stopped at the light. It turns green, yellow, red and green. We cross the intersection, there, then gone.