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.
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.
“I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden
