on my shopping list: milk, bread, butter, apples, cheese, coffee
what I actually came home with: bread, pears, tiny tomatoes, incense, dark chocolate and a bottle of wine
Shopping
Category Archives: photography
Beautiful Yellow Things
sunflowers drying in the afternoon sun
amber honey poured into hot ginger tea
reflective golden sunsets
ripe sensual pears in a chipped bowl
single citrine leaves on bare trees
My thoughts in the middle of the night
i think of the lantern flies hibernating in the winter
(their beauty and their destructiveness)
i think about the sculptural tree fungus
(some fungus is good and some is harmful)
i grieve the space dog, Laika
(why, why, why did they have to send her into space?)
my lost heart locket haunts me, 50 years later
(if i bought another, would it heal the longing?)
maybe some tea would be good right now
(lemon ginger or peppermint?)
Purple Thoughts
the lilac light seeps into twilight dreams—
a velveteen cape, a basket of plums, a violet crystal,
lavender stalks swaying in foreign fields
The Portal Hour
(glass sculptures by Hans Godo Frabel displayed at Phipps Conservatory, Pittsburgh PA)
3:00 a.m. —
the portal hour between worlds,
those who sleep
and those who do not
Excerpt from the Foreword of: Mariposas Nocturnas
Though they crawl on the gilded borders of illuminated manuscripts from another time, often seen as marginalia, I see moths as living oracles who do not speak but quietly land on the surface of things, often as a disturbance calling our attention to the importance of all that is hidden.
excerpt from the Foreword by Terry Tempest Williams in the volume of photography entitled, Mariposas Nocturnas by Emmit Gowin, 2017
Vertigo in Images
In the Blue Morning
early, in the blue morning,
with a dusting of wet snow
and bitter wind,
the crows make their way from their roost—
their cacophony of sound traveling on the falling,
thick flakes, from a height that renders them small black specks that i struggled to see, beyond the iciness that clung to my lashes
Opening Line from: Pachinko
History has failed us, but no matter.
opening line from the book, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, 2017
Lately: in my head
memories of flowers — paper whites in a window, elegant, tall gladiolas, dried roses in a wooden bowl
this song: You’re No Good, the Linda Ronstadt version
these words: petrichor (thank you Brian) and elysian
black horses in my dreams, wild dogs, the woods and snow clouds
the sound of a relentless rain on a sleepless night
winter, spring, summer and fall sunsets — how different they look and how different they feel
spanishwoods 