EKPHRASIS | Ekphrastic writing seeks to give visual art a second life, to describe it, extend it, deepen it. Our experience of visual art is shaped by what it is we seek, whether viewing it or creating it, and the personal and social connections it elicits or those connections we wish to express, as well our readiness to be moved, our state of mind, our emotional state, all of which we may choose to describe, analyze, share, speak and write about; and indeed, we often do.
These are the images that stirred in me a need to write, to explore or amplify feelings and ideas, or that resonated with particular passages from my reading in literature. In some cases, the writing came first.
The Roots of Awareness
In each of us, There are faces hidden, Yet to be seen, Yet to be justified, Moment to moment, Joy, fear, beauty, suffering, cruelty, —Phylogenetic forces Rooted in entropy’s temporary defeats. The drive to survive. Emergence of the other, then of...
Doorway?
Perhaps this is the memory of a doorway, or the sound of rain and the morning mist infused with light, or leaving and absence.
Echoes of Another Life
Emerging in this liminal space,
A boundless before-time.
A floor, a doorway, a face.
Final Fool
“El sutil comepiedras,” The Subtle Stone Eater. An ironic title for this bronze and obsidian sculpture by Jonás Gutiérrez on Puerto Vallarta’s Malecón? Is this an allegory for fruitless and unrestrained consumption? Dissipation heedless of the...
Sealed Doorways
In the human wrist is the hand enslaved by vanity. This Aztec obeisance chiseled centuries ago —Ihíio, Itlátol, His Breath, His Word— Now muzzled in stone, a doorway sealed. And of those still bound to the light? Those in the war against darkness,...
Recondite Reflections
What is this ditch but a split in the earth, a millrace stilled, a catchment for water, fallen limbs and leaves. Here are the hidden places of nature’s divination, a cauldron of dark harmonies, descending roots and rising connections. Beneath...
Do You Remember?
Do you remember how we returned each day, deflated, scattering our clothes about the room, anchoring our shoes by the bed, and how we lay breathless by the window, open to the lake? How the wind would enter, tentatively at first, its soft paws...
Autumn Currents
Is there a place where the waves began? A moment when the wind first crashed into the trees? Is there an end to this wild splendor? To these currents of fire? Or is there no end, no beginning, and this fierce surge is just suspended here, in...