I regret wanting to catch butterflies in a net as a child, my desire to see them pinned. I never saw a butterfly in the same way again. Beauty and freedom flitted past my consciousness. I was less alive forever.
No lambs here. Tree limbs like veined cracks of desert. I once loved in a higher elevation. Next to you on the chill ground of Carson National Forest. I'd never felt so close to God, to anyone. But my body never followed yours fully. A pain you held close. Until we parted. After.
I write paintings, or poems about paintings or their creators. My walls ache with images. I'm amazed when people don't look at them. Ask questions. Sigh at beauty. Flinch at suffering. When I enter any space, I look for images to ponder. How can I pass by? Because they are not marketed by Nike? Because in America all images are blurred by the speed at which we move?
Snow falls lightly on the Art Institute lions. I love the ending of "The Dead". Snow falling generally over Ireland... "on the treeless hills, softly falling upon the Bog of Allen and farther westward, softly falling into the dark, mutinous Shannon waves... upon all the living and the dead."*
*From James Joyce's Dubliners
