Via Negativa

Coyote Crossing
There are layers upon layers in the mountains across the way, old sweetness congealed in suffering. A million years of lakefloor sediment, one mortal heart’s cessation layered upon another a billion at a time and then hardened over, and then an age of infrequent rains began to wipe out all evidence of their lives bit by eroded bit.
—-

This entry was posted Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 8:48 am and is filed under Smorgasblog.

The above quote is the copyrighted work of its author. Please click through and read the entire post (and leave a comment there if you wish).

My other projects on the web

Qarrtsiluni, a literary magazine I co-edit
Festival of the Trees, a blog carnival I co-founded
Open Micro, a group blog I belong to dedicated to poetry in 140 or fewer characters
Moving Poems, my daily compendium of video poems from YouTube, Vimeo, and beyond
The Morning Porch, Twitter-length prose-poems based on the view from my porch first thing in the morning
Woodrat Photoblog, "a midden of photos from a Pennsylvania mountaintop"
Shadow Cabinet, an online collection of my more recent poems
Spoil, an online collection of my older poems

(For a complete listing, see my Google profile)

Smorgasblog

Parmanu
But Hopper didn’t paint any snowy landscapes, did he? I wonder why. The loneliness and solitude of people in his cityscapes would, it seems to me, be accentuated in a street filled with snow. I can almost imagine the effect of streetlamp light bouncing off the snow, and the resulting shadows on nearby objects.
----

Mutating the Signature
Don’t bring your tires
stripped of hot rims, or used
condoms, syringes or jumbo sized
needles. Leave the headless
doll in the truck, along with wrappers,
giddy snack vestiges and Keystone
cans.
----

the cassandra pages
Her features rubbed with a wooden spoon,
Fadwa's Damascene face emerges
beneath my hands black with printing ink...
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Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog
I may yet soften the massed patterning of leaves and branches, but it nevertheless has to be present, carefully arranged to suggest a foliate barricade made by a careful gardener to create a safe oasis from the wilderness beyond. Perhaps I'll put some sheep on the distant hills rising to the upper edge of the painting. And some low mounds of rock plants. The painting evolves and becomes dense with shapes and patterning, shadow and highlight, colour and tone.
----

everything feeds process
In stories like Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz or The Little Mermaid, the main character has to make sense of a world that is not her own. In my mind, this is an excellent metaphor for living as a grown-up in modern times.
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slow reads
This cold has eyes, not menacing or even intent ones, but the limpid eyes of the cold dead, the kind of eyes that feel every nape’s tooth marks. This cold moves as slowly as black water, silently as the far side of fish: unpied, canopied — the crosshatch of hawks.
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Coyote Mercury
Somewhere along those dusty Philippine roads my fascination with war turned to recoiling as I realized it was one thing to reenact battles with my friends, but quite another to walk endless miles along a trail of brutality, hopelessness and murder. I think it was then that the idea of war began to move from fantasy to nightmare as we walked through Bataan imagining the sheer horror of the reality our reenactment was meant to remember.
----

The Middlewesterner
Even the crow
knows nothing

except that hope
is a kind of

uselessness.
----

Heraclitean Fire
And while zebra finches aren’t exactly imbued with an enormous amount of dignity at the best of times, there was something slightly off-putting about seeing these little birds with their own aims and desires in life being cajoled into being art.
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Timothy Green
As soon as we start to revere the writer over the writing, literature becomes a cult of personality. We crown these gods and pretend there could be no other. And I think that’s the real problem with literary publishing.
----

Via Negativa

How can we live without the unknown before us? —Rene Char

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