There is a resignation in the cone of a white pine,
dropped by its mother onto a clump of dried mown grass,
which I arrange among my collection of spent things,
white sap coating my fingers in resinous gratitude.
Help me lift my head up
that I might see the full arc of the sun
one last time before I fall
We will stay here
Until every last petal
Has dropped from our stems
In honor of flowers plucked from life too soon
Their pristine white and luminous yellow and red and purple and orange
Etched into the memory of a fading blue sky
Of day turned to permanent night
Never a Fall or Winter or Spring
To come again
But in the Summer their seeds will have taken root
And birds and butterflies and bumblebees
Will remember each life come to violent end
As humans will not
As humans cannot
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
Impossible to photograph the entire length of a tree’s tallness in a Redwood Forest. There is no vantage point from which to take in the details of each tree’s skin, branches, fingers, moods.
The palpable energy of the forest, yet quiet and serene, still almost, the silence interrupted only by hushed voices of visitors and the sound of their shoes on the dusty trail.
I promised to return
to the shaggy mantle of grass
that binds you
surrounded by golf courses, which should amuse you
supine, facing westward hoping to catch the sunset,
at least it seems that way to me.
I imagined papering my body with the translucent skins of onions,
the unsweet scent shielding me from predators,
a perfume of protection to wear under my homemade clothes.
I moved to New York City from San Francisco to run CBS Records’ Customer Merchandising department, a heady job for a young woman barely two years out of college, producing graphic and photographic merchandising visuals at the recording label that was home to so many musical artists I had loved in my young life.
On a dark and cloudy Friday morning six years ago, with the rain pouring down on the commons at Columbia University and students shielding their heads under umbrellas crippled by the wind, I holed up against the early summer chill on the Rare Books and Archives floor of Butler Library hoping to discover Columbia’s early history of organized theatre productions.
…I like to take long walks through the villages and cities I visit, taking pictures of street scenes and landscapes as I go. But mostly, I like to take pictures of people, stopping them to ask if they would mind. If they don’t mind, interesting things can happen.
An Asphalt Shadow Self-Portrait remembrance of The Great American Eclipse.
I spent the last two months driving back and forth between New York City and photographer Cheryl Machat Dorskind’s home in Westhampton, New York, shooting her in her studio and in her backyard, accompanying her on professional portrait shoots, a photography boat safari, and random photography walks in the inland wetlands and on the beaches and marsh landscape of Eastern Long Island.
I got the last copy of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad at B’s & N’s yesterday.
You haven’t had a burger until you’ve had a Sugar Burger. Somehow you have to get yourself to Embudo, New Mexico (some say Dixon, some say Velarde) beside the Rio Grande River between Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico to get your hands on one of them, but once you do it will be difficult, if not impossible, to eat any other kind of burger once you’ve tasted a Sugar Burger.
The philosophy Make Art, not War is one I grew up with. My parents were surrounded by artists, artists who worked obscurely at their crafts in the deserts of Northern New Mexico, artists who took a long time to make names for themselves, because things taking a long time is rather part and parcel of working in obscurity.
“You’ve said that twice in the last 15 minutes,” my friend Hartley noted, watching me wolf down a spicy fish taco at Bill’s Burger Bar just off Rockefeller Plaza.
E.B. White’s Here is New York has long been my favorite book about the city in which I live. Published in 1949,Here is New York is thought of as more of an essay because of its short length, a mere 56 pages, into which White packed such timeless observations about the island of Manhattan that this ‘essay book’ has a permanent place on my desk.
This is the way I feel this morning. Smoky.
Something a little dreamy
Under a mound of dirt you lay
I imagine a saxophone
Playing ‘Round Midnight
Maple trees line the road
Their shade saved for the living
While you lay beneath the blazing sun
As long as I’m in the Hip Hop Music Mood, or Mode, whichever you prefer, I might as well be in the Hip Hop Dance…
In the Summer of 2006, the day before I returned to New York after using my entire year’s vacation to study Italian at the Università per Stranieri in Siena, Italy, I took an early bus to Arezzo and spent the morning roaming the city taking pictures. After the cool early hours had morphed into lunchtime, I found a little trattoria on a small piazza where I could have a salad and a cold glass of Prosecco to ward off the heat that had begun to rise from the cobbled vicolos.
The Argentine Tango.
Attached is an optimistic article on Aducanumab, a new drug being developed by Biogen that (hopefully) shows the…
I watch the mesquite-scented smoke plume rise from the incense burner and remember Winters in the New Mexico desert.
Dance with yourself
It turns out that Doris Day, Bob Dylan and Emmy Rossum have something in common, which is an apparent appreciation…
I ought to have been born between the World Wars, when it was romantic to be sentimental, when having an attachment to the past was normal, when lovers would hand-write nostalgia-filled letters whenever apart, when taking a journey down a memory lane strewn with tales of adventures and friends and events long gone by could rouse a spontaneous and unembarrassed launch into Doris Day’s and Les Brown’s rendition of A Sentimental Journey.
Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce…
When I was in high school I knew nothing of poetry, except a schoolgirl’s frustration at not being able to answer…
On the Upper West Side of New York, across town from my apartment, rage foments outside of the Metropolitan Opera’s…
“Certain things fall silent in us when we think that certain things are no longer possible.” – Frank Bidart, Poet,…
The Fogs of August
I don’t watch much television, but these past few months I have looked forward to late Sunday nights with Neil deGrasse Tyson and Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey, an update of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which aired in 1980 to mesmerized viewing.
Standing on the barren landscape of what was once Uruk in ancient Sumer, now known as Iraq, in The Immortals (Episode 11 of the modernized series), Tyson tells us about Enheduanna, an Akkadian Princess (2285-2250 BCE) about whom I had never heard until The Immortals aired on May 18, 2014.
Lovers loving. Dancers dancing. Fountains rising and falling. At the ballet.
I hardly know where to begin deconstructing some of the lunacy in the attached article about why girls are doing…
Perhaps that’s why we see so much vitriol online, so many anonymous, bitter comments, so many imprudent tweets and…
‘Twould appear this Sunday morning that March is wrestling with whether to remain a Lion, or to become a Lamb.
This ice dance between Meryl Davis and Charlie White is sublime.
Forgive my appearance, my Lady.
