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.
How to Express The Need To Flee
How to express the need to flee, this need to stay, this need to witness the dark interiors of dreams, the unfinished conversations, the continuous and mad erasure of time, the perpetual whirl of dissolution? It is the body I sleep with, wake with,...
The Moment of Whispers
It comes, the moment of whispers. The trees standing in the deepening stillness of dusk, listening. Their pale silhouettes rising, weightless, above the snow into the fading light. Palimpsests evaporating from winter's parchment, to be rewritten...
What is Light
Until it’s seen, what is light? We sense it, describe it, just as we do love or envy or desire—vibrations and waves that at any moment become something else, mirroring the quicksilver of our feelings. Is this an arm raised? A tree, alone in the...
Winter Ecstasies
Winter’s strange harvests. Night, a rupture. Day, divided. Songs of the forgotten now concealed in snow. The whirl of dissolution. The language of rapture, released! The erasure of time. Love! Fear! Photograph! Write! Justify! Witness! Dream the...
Infinity’s Mockery
The rushing wind is oblivious of the roiling leaves, or of the light dragging the shadows through the trees, or of our stories, the fusions of self and place, the iterations of mind, these expressionist forms, here, the buried matrices of time and...
Easter Ended as We Drove
Easter ended as we drove home on the interstate, the moon nearly full and rising. Even the boys commented on it, a preternaturally large, grey mass lying low in the sky, an old coin. A bead rubbed smooth over the millennia. A hard, airless world...
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 forcesRooted 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.