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Posts from the “Photo Poetry” Category

and hope’s a reptile waiting for the sun

Sandra Peterson Ramirez

Posted on February 5, 2014

In Hiding

Lui et Elle

O Mistress, Mistress,

Reptile Mistress,

Your eye is very dark, very bright,

And it never softens

Although you watch.

 

~from Lui et Elle by D. H. Lawrence

 

 

February

The cold grows colder, even as the days

grow longer, February’s mercury vapor light

buffing but not defrosting the bone-white

ground, crusty and treacherous underfoot.

This is the time of year that’s apt to put

a hammerlock on a healthy appetite,

old anxieties back into the night,

insomnia and nightmares into play;

when things in need of doing go undone

and things that can’t be undone come to call,

muttering recriminations at the door,

and buried ambitions rise up through the floor

and pin your wriggling shoulders to the wall;

and hope’s a reptile waiting for the sun.

 

~from February by Bill Christophersen

 

Source: Poetry (February 2002)

 

 

 

*****

 

Photo by Sandra Peterson Ramirez.

 

Unmarked

Sandra Peterson Ramirez

Posted on January 12, 2014

No Flowers

 

I know flowers to be funeral companions
they make poisons and venoms
and eat abandoned stone walls
I know flowers shine stronger
than the sun
                                     their eclipse means the end of
times
but I love flowers for their treachery
their fragile bodies
grace my imagination’s avenues
without their presence
my mind would be an unmarked
grave.

 

 

~from The Spring Flowers Own by Etel Adnan

Photo by Sandra Peterson Ramirez

As Evening Gathers

Sandra Peterson Ramirez

Posted on October 28, 2013

The Watchers

 

No shadow from anything as evening gathers its objects
And eases into earshot.
Under the influx of the outtake,
                                                  Leon Battista Alberti says,
Some lights are from stars, some from the sun
And moon, and other lights are from fires.
The light from the stars makes the shadow equal to the body.
Light from fire makes it greater,
              there, under the tongue, there, under the utterance.

~from A Short History of the Shadow by Charles Wright

 

Photo by Sandra Peterson Ramirez

And the ghosts

Sandra Peterson Ramirez

Posted on September 16, 2013

At Sea

 

they own everything

 

~ Graham Foust

 

 

 

Photo by Sandra Peterson Ramirez.

This poem originally appeared in “Poetry Not Written for Children that Children Might Nevertheless Enjoy,” by Lemony Snicket. Source: Poetry (September 2013).

13 Ways: Thunder, for Violet

td Whittle

Posted on September 11, 2013

It’s times like these, I miss that cat. You taught me ‘thunder,’ but not how to make it stop.   You come and go (Where do you go all day?) But that cat – that magic cat, who turned off the sky with a flick of her tail, and back on again with a yawn – She came to stay.   You would not name her.   Now, you say, “That was no magic cat, only a stray — And, anyway, she could not turn off – or on – the sky!   She told me that you would say that, and that all people lie.   Now, the cat you would not name – she being ‘the blackest thing you ever saw,’ and…

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13 Ways: Waiting

td Whittle

Posted on August 29, 2013

this is memory — or this is dreams — or this is a memory of dreams. I lie (a darkly-yearning thing) waiting for you to cross the bridge, from where you come, to where you go You are lithe and fair and solitary — the keeper of my hope feel my heart like music carried on the wind run to me, trailing sunlight leap, a backwards child, into this forest womb I lie (a darkly-yearning thing) waiting to catch you in my arms.   ***** Photo by Sandra Peterson Ramirez. Text by td Whittle.    

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Music, by Mary Oliver

td Whittle

Posted on July 31, 2013

NSW

 

I tied together

a few slender reeds, cut

notches to breathe across and made

such music you stood

shock still and then

 

followed as I wandered growing

moment by moment

slant-eyed and shaggy, my feet

slamming over the rocks, growing

hard as horn, and there

 

you were behind me, drowning

in the music, letting

the silver clasps out of your hair,

hurrying, taking off

your clothes.

 

*

 

I can’t remember

where this happened but I think

it was late summer when everything

is full of fire and rounding to fruition

and whatever doesn’t,

or resists,

must lie like a field of dark water under

the pulling moon,

tossing and tossing.

 

*

 

In the brutal elegance of cities

I have walked down

the halls of hotels

 

and heard this music behind

shut doors.

 

*

 

Do you think the heart

is accountable? Do you think the body

any more than a branch

of the honey locust tree,

 

hunting water,

hunching toward the sun,

shivering, when it feels

that good, into

white blossoms?

 

Or do you think there is a kind

of music, a certain strand

that lights up the otherwise

blunt wilderness of the body —

a furious

and unaccountable selectivity?

 

*

 

Ah well, anyway, whether or not

it was in late summer, or even

in our part of the world, it is all

only a dream. I did not

turn into the lithe goat god. Nor did you come running

like that.

 

*

 

Did you?

 

“Music” from American Primitive

Poems by Mary Oliver

Little Brown & Company, New York 1983

Photo by Robin Whittle

 

 

In Blackwater Woods, by Mary Oliver

td Whittle

Posted on July 20, 2013

Ophelia-by-JE-Millais

Ophelia, by Sir John Everett Millais, c. 1851-1852 (Tate Gallery, London)

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

 

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

 

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

 

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

 

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

 

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

 

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

 

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

 

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

 

“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive. © Back Bay Books, 1983.

Gallery: Cape Schanck to Bushrangers Bay Coastal Walk

td Whittle

Posted on June 27, 2013

tunnel-of-tea-trees

“To get back up to the shining world from there
My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel,

 

And Following its path, we took no care
To rest, but climbed: he first, then I — so far,
through a round aperture I saw appear

 

Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”

 

― Dante Alighieri, from Inferno Canto XXXIV, Robert Pinsky translation (1995)

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The Beginning is Happiness

Sandra Peterson Ramirez

Posted on June 23, 2012

    

Is there a sound? There is a forest.

What is the world? The word is wilderness.

What is the answer? The answer is the world.

What is the beginning? A beginning is happiness.

What is the end? No one lives there now.

What is a beginning? The beginning is light.

What makes happiness? Nothing.

What makes an ending? What does not.

What is her skin? Her skin is composed of strange clothing and clouds of butterflies,

          of events and odors, of the rose fingers of dawn, transparent suns of full

          daylight, blue loves of dusk and night fish with huge eyes.

                                                                                                     Max Walter Svanberg

 

~from Trouble Deaf Heaven by Bin Ramke 

   
Photo by Sandra Peterson Ramirez  

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