walking without mirrors

Visiting sand dunes along the North Coast. Sedge, lupine, coyote bush. We walked with pure motion, forward, until we saw the waves. All echo. Neither of us said much. The sounds were open, in flight. Words hadn't been there for a while.

When I look at photographs, I try to see myself in every face. It makes them into mirrors. Otherwise they would be free to speak their own mind, or might even catch up a tune carried on in another room. Soliloquy, harmony, echo. Often, I want something from them. I want to know how it is to be seen.

It's an old-fashioned word. Photo-graph. Something mechanical we hammered together with zest and a sense of providing for the future of the lexicon. So we will remember how it was when it has inevitably passed.

A bird in a branch, its wing flashes the same color as his jacket. We kept moving.

So you're moving to Missouri,

how do you feel about that? are there rules? have you made friends? what is it like, this new place of yours? do you spend your time at work? do you read novels? do you miss New England? has the place made itself home? or is it just a calling that keeps you?

does your adventure feel like Jo in New York City? Jane Eyre? Or perhaps Peter in Narnia? maybe it just feels like your life, as nothing has quite yet. does it feel like what you've imagined for yourself, or is it a surprise view from an unexpected twist of the path?

is it a poem or is it a novel? heroic? romantic? divine comedy? or maybe you can really only discern the words and their shape looking backwards over the distance you've traveled. perhaps the pattern has yet to emerge. perhaps it's one long utterance that goes on and on, changing shape with the speaker's lips, but never ceasing. has it grown that way, from within, something that has been born and grown outward like music? but then again, maybe it winds across land, shaped and shaping itself against the rocks it moves through.

so many oxbows in the ribbon. gnarls in the oak. how is it, my old friend? how is is with you?