Rough Ideas

We left a friend’s house in the late afternoon grey skies. On the route home we always love the rolling hills and the endless apple orchard. Usually, I like to stop for a photograph. As I was contemplating where to stop a sky-filling burst of starlings seeded the sky. All I could do was wish I had wings.

To go in the dark

To go in the dark
with a light
is to know the light.

To know the dark,
go dark.

Go without sight,
and find that the dark,
too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet
and dark wings.

– Wendell Berry, in Terrapin: Poems by Wendell Berry

While photographing today I wondered if my pictures have been too grey. I felt as if the alphabet of imagery and inspiration in my landscape is lacking the darkness of crows amidst the bright witness of the moon. I was dreaming of the pop of color only a grocery store tulip could provide.

Why Are Your Poems So Dark?

Isn’t the moon dark too,
most of the time?

And doesn’t the white page
seem unfinished

without the dark stain
of alphabets?

When God demanded light,
he didn’t banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

and that small mole
on your left cheekbone.

Or did you mean to ask
“Why are you sad so often?”

Ask the moon.
Ask what it has witnessed.

–Linda Pastan

As the third child in my family of four and the only girl I was labeled the cry baby. My older brothers worried … was I too sensitive to survive? But as an adult I practice saying what I really feel, experimenting with how to express it. I realize I was just frustrated by trying too hard. It wasn’t about being a girl, or being younger. It was about trusting my feelings and learning to express my own experience.

When i can't express
what i really feel
i practice feeling
what i can express
and none of it is equal

I know
but that's why mankind
alone among the animals
learns to cry

--Nikki Giovanni, excerpt from "Choices"

We are all weeds.

On a Pink Moon

I take out my anger
And lay its shadow

On the stone I rolled
Over what broke me.

I plant three seeds
As a spell. One

For what will grow
Like air around us,

One for what will
Nourish and feed,

One for what will
Cling and remind me–

We are the weeds.

–Ada Limon

I have been scrolling through a year’s worth of photos and paging through notebooks looking for images that spark not only time and place, but my hand, eye, and heart. I imagine each image to be a leaf falling from a tree. It’s as if I have been out after sunset with my headlamp looking for myself or the trail that we have traversed. The images are less a record of where we have been, but rather more what we have been noticing.

“and I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.”

–Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Elizabeth Holland
from about January 20, 1856

Last night after sunset I called a friend. She commented on the moon rise. I had been pondering the last light in the western sky. I am glad she inspired me to look for the moon, which was almost full and reflected in the pond.

This morning when Warren and I returned from our morning walk the sky began to spit raindrops. Later, the light drizzle turned to snow flurries. I hunkered down with my last two years worth of notebooks, adding labels and revisiting their contents. The snow was picturesque and although I wanted to make paper cutouts of snow flakes I paged through the incompleteness of my sketchbooks.

The Wonder of the Imperfect

Nothing that I do is finished
so I keep returning to it
lured by the notion that I long
to see the whole of it at last
completed and estranged from me

but no the unfinished is what
I return to as it leads me on
I am made whole by what has just
escaped me as it always does
I am made of incompleteness
the words are not there in words

oh gossamer gossamer breath
moment daylight life untouchable
by no name with no beginning

what do we think we recognize

–W. S. Merwin, The Wonder of the Imperfect

As I walk I continue to pick up leaves and carry them home in my pockets. Their shapes inspire form and line, architecture and pattern. Their shadows might cross my face or heart. They might express the darkness of a crow’s wing or reveal history stored in the pockets of an old coat; saved shapes still holding hope. After I take each leaf out of my pocket I fold it into the pages of books like small boats who are keepers of memory, color, and contour; vessels that keep going.

I  wake  like  a  hand  on  a  handle.  Tomorrow 

Marches  on  the  old  walls,  and  there 

Is  my  coat  full  of  darkness  in  its  place 

On  the  door. 

Welcome  home, 

Memory. 

–W. S. Merwin, excerpt from Recognition, in The Moving Target, 1963
(Full poem at number 38)

This morning, when I took the compost out the wheel barrow was filled with ice. Our coffee cups were drained and the day felt full of promise so despite the cold Warren and I headed out for a walk along the Rappahannock River.

There are mornings when everything brims with promise, even my empty cup.

–Ted Kooser, from Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry, by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser, Copper Canyon Press, 2003

The poet Nikki Giovanni passed away on December 9, 2024. I am grateful for her words, her voice, her vision, and her journey.

A Journey

It’s a journey . . . that I propose . . . I am not the guide . . . nor technical assistant . . . I will be your fellow passenger . . .

Though the rail has been ridden . . . winter clouds cover . . . autumn’s exuberant quilt . . . we must provide our own guide-posts . . .

I have heard . . . from previous visitors . . . the road washes out sometimes . . . and passengers are compelled . . . to continue groping . . . or turn back . . . I am not afraid . . .

I am not afraid . . . of rough spots . . . or lonely times . . . I don’t fear . . . the success of this endeavor . . . I am Ra . . . in a space . . . not to be discovered . . . but invented . . .

I promise you nothing . . . I accept your promise . . . of the same we are simply riding . . . a wave . . . that may carry . . . or crash . . .

It’s a journey . . . and I want . . . to go . . .

–Nikki Giovanni, A Journey from The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968–1998, copyright compilation © 2003 by Nikki Giovanni.

It was as if I was on a search for color. On the evening walk I picked up some tiny pears that had dropped from a Bradford pear tree. They were greenish yellow and drank in the bright orange of the sunset far to the west and the clear sky being blown our way. I studied the mossy green of the wet stones on the path as well as the blond of the tall grasses and the deep dark green of the cedars. I notice that when I have been photographing the last few days I am drawn to the red pear or the brilliant pomegranate as if I need the spark to set my imagination going.

This morning during a break in the rain I walked the hillside below the studio studying vines. I am drawn to the orange and red of the berries on bittersweet, but it is such an invasive plant I will not drag it anywhere for fear of spreading it even more. Instead, I cut a few vines that were strangling saplings. I chose one to put in my image for the day, perhaps befriending an enemy within my landscape.

The color of springtime is flowers; the color of winter is in our imagination.

–Terri Guillemets, a “quote collector,” The Quote Garden.