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Indian Summer

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.

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Sunflower, in Mourning

Help me lift my head up
that I might see the full arc of the sun
one last time before I fall

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In Memoriam

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

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Blackbird, sung by Emmett Altman-Khislavsky in Merced, California

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

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Henry Cowell Redwoods, Santa Cruz, California

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.

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Smooth Revisit: Ode to Bruce Lundvall

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.

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Ode to a Sikh

Morning

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Ode to Myself

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.

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HEART CONNECTION: A portrait of Cheryl Machat Dorskind

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.

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On Using Feminine Energy

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.

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When I travel…

…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.

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Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi

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The Great American Eclipse

An Asphalt Shadow Self-Portrait remembrance of The Great American Eclipse.

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The Swans of Remsenburg, Long Island

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.

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Sam Shepard 1943-2017

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Circling Georgia O’Keeffe’s beloved Cerro Pedernal in a Cessna 172

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The stillness of the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver

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The Lion King last night

Went to see The Lion King last night.

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Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad

I got the last copy of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad at B’s & N’s yesterday.

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Backstage at the Cubiculo Theatre

Flash Back Friday

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Random Encounters

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Martin Puryear’s Art in Madison Square Park

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The trauma of failing handwriting as a girl

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Sugar’s, Embudo, New Mexico

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.

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Miriam Dunn’s Who Will Love the Crow

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Sylvie Guillem in BYE, choreographed by Mats Ek

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Walk on Water

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A Beauty of an Argentine Tango

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My New York City in Photos

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The Meaning of Relevance

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Ana Padron & Diego Blanco Milonga

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Come Closer, Dance Closer to me…

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In Cornolo, Italy, I met this woman.

How well do we know our parents?

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After Hours at the Picasso Sculpture Exhibit at MoMA

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.

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Woman, Writer, Designer, Wife, Stepmother: The Many Labels of Me

“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.

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Here is My New York

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.

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I feel Smoky this morning

This is the way I feel this morning. Smoky.

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Whorl Wedding Rings

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The Art of Standing in Meditation

The Art of Standing in Meditation

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Something a little dreamy…

Something a little dreamy

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‘Round Daylight: Ode to Bruce Lundvall

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

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Misty Copeland & Kendric Lamar

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…

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A Man, Sitting in a Park in Arezzo…

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.

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The Argentine Tango

The Argentine Tango.

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My mother died with Alzheimer’s

Attached is an optimistic article on Aducanumab, a new drug being developed by Biogen that (hopefully) shows the…

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After the Rain, a Pas de Deux by Christopher Wheeldon

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The glimmer and hope of Spring

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Dancer Eileen Kramer at 100

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I watch the mesquite-scented smoke plume rise from the incense burner and remember Winters in the New Mexico desert.

I watch the mesquite-scented smoke plume rise from the incense burner and remember Winters in the New Mexico desert.

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I wait for the light

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Alive Inside, A Story of Music and Memory

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Dr. Oliver Sacks & the Healing Power of Music

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Dance with yourself

Dance with yourself

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It turns out that Doris Day, Bob Dylan and Emmy Rossum have something in common, which is an apparent appreciation…

It turns out that Doris Day, Bob Dylan and Emmy Rossum have something in common, which is an apparent appreciation…

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A Room of My Own in My Father’s New York

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.

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Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce…

Studies have shown that writing about oneself and personal experiences can improve mood disorders, help reduce…

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Galway Kinnell (1927-2014)

When I was in high school I knew nothing of poetry, except a schoolgirl’s frustration at not being able to answer…

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“The Death of Klinghoffer” at the Metropolitan Opera

On the Upper West Side of New York, across town from my apartment, rage foments outside of the Metropolitan Opera’s…

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A Downside to the Internet

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“Certain things fall silent in us when we think that certain things are no longer possible.” – Frank Bidart, Poet,…

“Certain things fall silent in us when we think that certain things are no longer possible.” – Frank Bidart, Poet,…

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The Fogs of August

The Fogs of August

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Lying under the Siena Sky

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Childhood

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The Mythical Presence of Eros & Psyche: A Dialogue about the Bedroom, the Boardroom…and a Piece of Bread (Dedicated to Maya Angelou)

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.

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Lovers loving. Dancers dancing. Fountains rising and falling. At the ballet.

Lovers loving. Dancers dancing. Fountains rising and falling. At the ballet.

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Why do girls do better in school?

I hardly know where to begin deconstructing some of the lunacy in the attached article about why girls are doing…

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On Not Growing Up With Money

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1927-2014

My favorite writer has died.

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Dear Men:

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Perhaps that’s why we see so much vitriol online, so many anonymous, bitter comments, so many imprudent tweets and…

Perhaps that’s why we see so much vitriol online, so many anonymous, bitter comments, so many imprudent tweets and…

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‘Twould appear this Sunday morning that March is wrestling with whether to remain a Lion, or to become a Lamb.

‘Twould appear this Sunday morning that March is wrestling with whether to remain a Lion, or to become a Lamb.

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My Garden in Winter

My Garden in Winter

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This ice dance between Meryl Davis and Charlie White is sublime.

This ice dance between Meryl Davis and Charlie White is sublime.

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Forgive my appearance, my Lady.

Forgive my appearance, my Lady.

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Where will you be when you are old?

Where will you be when you are old?

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