What the Heck is This Words | Pictures Thing?
It’s a blog. Beyond that, no promises as to what exactly it will be.
I’m a creative writer and picture taker since the age of having hair and braces. Now, I focus mostly on nature and our fraught place in it. Rather than morning pages or journalling, which are productive habits for many writers, I like to walk with my camera, see what catches my eye, and snap the image. And pretty soon I’m lost in the cadence of walking and looking, and then a line or a fragment comes from the ether. I’ve learned to follow. The line might be part of a novel I’m working on. It might be short and unto itself. Whichever it is, this routine is the one dependable thing that awakens my muse and sets me to my writing for the day, and I hope it brings a moment of reflection or inspiration to yours.
I call some of what I’ll do here, these short pieces, One Thing, but they are really two; a picture paired with short prose. The subject could be anything. Like poems or stray thoughts but inspired by the photography. Rather than talk about process, I’d rather just do it. And I’ll share other creative work, both brief and long. A story, a poem, an essay. Whatever these posts are, their intent is to both sharpen my blade and hopefully carve out some quiet space for you in the middle of our chaotic days.
Another World
The coffee grows cold again this morning. I've forgotten it exists, lost in the brief escape where thoughts and words are colliding in a tenuous weave. The computer screen glows in the coming light. One moment words are a failed lift off, the next its outer space. Into the wormhole and time is bent into a different realm. What I am left with, the words assembled on the screen, is a mystery as to how they appeared and where time went.
Rising Through the Fallen
The late autumn air
has cooled in quadrants
of forties and thirties.
The prairie trail is
hollowed, a seawall of
brown stalks taller than
the average man.
At the Gulf
On the edge of the white beach I am alone near the sea grass tall and waving and dying. Again and again and again the shore laps in the hot wind. The sand here is powder. At times windswept leaving ripples across the wide plain into the gulf that is firming the firmed shore where walkers walk and runners run and bikes wheel with asphalt assurance.
Companions
This is the divide in the trail
where we go our separate ways
you into memory fully sprinting
coat shining chasing who knows what
into who knows where
and me still walking
into tomorrow where the leaves fall
and cover with snow
Puerto Vallarta
…we found each other, and that led to the annual three or four night adventures in Puerto Vallarta overlooking Banderas Bay. A six-thousand foot deep Banderas Bay, waves breaking white over blue and shimmering to the horizon, where oceanside meals are easily found and trinkets constantly sold, where a beach-combing vendor dropped his rather large and alive iguana on my shoulder, then asked me for money. Where too much tequila can be easily drunk…
