Brick City Aside: Saint Charles Street, Downtown Saint Louis

…not much of a street, really…

 

 

…kind of just…

 

 

…an alley with a name…

 

Child Within

 

I.

A little girl sits on a bench,
swings her legs 
and reads from her book 
of a thousand and one jokes.

I glimpse, in that act, 
a young woman,

and I am thrilled
and deeply
shaken
at once.


II.

A look crosses a woman’s face, 
flashes 

for less than a moment,
too fast 
to be
more than
barely seen.
The girl that once was
comes passing through
a passing thought 

and is caught  
—only not caught—

and gone before 
she is known 
for what she is
or what she was,

left with only the 
memory of 
an expression
of memory

passed beneath the surface.

The little girl is gone.




III.

A little boy cries out
from an old 
man’s face,
 
the sad one,
the lost one, 
the last one, 

beyond comprehension 
of a hard-won heart.

The learned self-given healing

—even that—
is gone.

Pain 
as can only be known
to a child is

carried on and on,
a burden that one 
never wants to open.
 


IV.

A son is asked 
by his father

—but it is the cry of the lost boy,
ripped from somewhere deep 
in the old man’s throat—

“Will you be my mommy?”

How can a son answer this,
when his father does the asking?

Is this what it feels like to be born?
To lose forever the warmth
that is still (but now only) 
known from within?

We find us both 
lost past longing
and long past lost.

Incomprehensible  
why this happens to any of us,
this slap that is existence.

A son is carried by his father
for so many years that he is
shocked to realize he is no 
longer being carried, surprised
to find himself standing with 
his own legs under him.


V.

A little girl sits on a bench,
swings her legs 
and reads her book 
of a thousand and one jokes.

I glimpse, in that act, 
a young woman,

and I am thrilled
and deeply
shaken
at once.

Sunday Softies

An afternoon spent in one of my favorite places….a little pocket of wildness in the heart of the city….with one of my favorite lenses….

…a hand-cut shaped aperture lends a little shimmer…

…and a spectral kind of sparkle…

 

…where the Bergamot….

…and other…

…wild things are…

 

 

It was….

(…an abecedarian…)

 

It was...

…about this time that I decided to
become the list, to see and feel what
came next, to know from within the
dead weight and heft of
every single 
form that I could fathom, the
grand scheme (if you will) of this
healing human game that has played
into (and out of) our history in countless ways for countless days,
jogging our memory, not judging us exactly, but still
keeping an eye on us from—
lying just there—just inside the door,
measuring and metering and giving
nonce notices from the threshold,
once in a while letting us 
pretend to be in control, 
(queer as that may seem) while still and stilly and quietly		
reassuring us about our lacks at the same time, and 
stretching us ever-so-gently, nursing us at the beginning and at the end, taking its
time with us, not leading us directly to (never that!) but at least pointing us 
                              ever more towards
understanding, placing things in our paths with the utmost 
veneration, teaching us the value and deep, deep roots of our
wonder, opening and reopening us, encouraging us to not fixate on the
x-y axis of every single thing around us, while still reminding us of the value 
                              of anchors,
yearning for us still and always to always and still reach somehow beyond our
zenith, and maybe—just maybe—helping us to get out there, somewhere just a 
                              little bit closer to it.

Brick City

(a new kind of amalgamating project, the idea for which I’ve been toying with for a while,,,,as I came to realize the rather ridiculous glut of “bricky” images I have in my files)

(a few of these images may be repeats or re-workings of images that have appeared on this blog before)

Bricks…

They’re pretty much everywhere you look in this town…

…probably to rival grains of sand in the Ganges…

…so, yes…

…plenty more to come…

Mild-Life Crises….What can also happen….

…when you cram a roll of 35mm film into a slightly less cheap, non-plastic (well, mostly)–but still Chinese–TLR (Twin Lens Reflex) camera that is also meant to only shoot 120 film….

…in this case expired Fuji Superia 100-speed color-negative print film…

…and in this case a Seagull 4A (I believe…well, it’s definitely a Seagul, I just can’t remember which model it is but regardless it is without a doubt a…) (a cheap Rolleiflex knockoff)…

…shot sometime around 2010-ish I think…

…couldn’t tell you when it expired…but let’s just say…a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far…..

…as I recall, I wasn’t really sure if any of these would even turn out since I kind of had to stand on the camera-back to get it to close and lock with that 35mm film canister crammed in there…

…I don’t recommend you trying this with any equipment that you actually care about (like a real Rolleiflex or say, Minolta Autocord)…

…But I DO recommend trying it!…

…much sharper images than what you get with a Holga…

…and you still get those nifty schprocket-holes…

…certainly no stellar photography here, but a fun experiment that I would love to do again someday…

(Highly recommend clicking on these for the slide-showy-thing for a closer look!)

(…well…except for the last one cuz it will actually get smaller in the slide-show-thingy…)