You know people live there: but they’re not visible
a bar sign blinks open
soiled lacy curtains droop
in a cafe’ window &
melancholy burns up from the asphalt
smelling rank, like ignorance.
What is visible: just the stink of their lives, dead formulations
just the junk of their lives, acres & acres
of stuff & stuff & stuff lying in heaps on the brown ground
rusted cordage, severed machine parts
second-hand throw-outs
deep-sixed for-eternity.
And yet daisies grow up through towers of scrapped tires
seed pods spool on a breeze of honeysuckle & float
above rusty dented fenders.
Is it all nature? the junk, funk, clunk
of shucked off & discarded stuff? is a
braided horse mane and a pretty girl the same
as an upturned rusty bucket lying in the weeds?
Hug the debris
hug all the hard places
hug the mountain road
speed the steep
slide & swerve.
Scud the gravel shoulder & with
a celebrated hoorah, “pull” a
Thelma & Louise.
Leap to the other side
cross over & join the heaps of old iron, glass & paper below
be disposed of & cast away.
Abandon the body without ceremony
like refuse among wildflowers.
As someone who carries her camera around, just not often enough, I think your photographs are terrific. The blurred shadings on the bottom picture add a certain something, not sure what to call it, to the entire composition. You inspire me to take those odd shots most people wouldn't even notice. They make the most interesting photos. Great stuff!
I too, take my camera everywhere and take pictures of what I call "incidentals"…all kinds of inanimate objects that I can pull from later when crafting prose or poetry. Over time I'm building my own library of photos (sometimes when I don't know what to write about, I flip through the library until a photo "tells" me what to write. Thanks for taking a look!
That top photo is gorgeous, Zoo! Tell me about it.
Nature may not be all pretty things, but your photos are beautiful. I wrote about a rather unglamorous part of nature today, as well. By the way, did you know Suzi Banks Baum and I got together this weekend and enjoyed the Black Rocks in Marquette? What a fun time!
Even discarded junk becomes picturesque after a while.
Oh, I so love Marquette. Great memories of going to school there. love to you both!
Brave beautiful Monica, this post is so captivating. As a woman who makes art from other people's trash, I see too the beauty in what happens when nature takes hold of what we have left aside.
About Marquette….what would you say to a visit there mid-August 2014? Kathy and I hatched a plan that I am spinning on- a reading of the Anthology with authors like you and Kathy at a local art gallery that features women artists, then a retreat in Big Bay for a weekend of art, writing, kayaking and sisterhood. I'd run it as a workshop with the Anthology authors as guests. I have to hatch some cash for this, but I am working on that too. Dream on it, okay? xooxox S
I work where I frequently drive by this sort of thing. However, in arid and semi-arid places such appears perhaps less lovely than when seen in rich green places where metal rusts rapidly. Perhaps this poem will allow me to look at all the refuse differently.
Your artistic vision found beauty in "the debris"…lovely.
Yes and maybe not so much that the junk is attractive, but the idea that nature is not just flowers and trees and rivers and sky. We are all a part of nature…the drunk behind the dumpster, the boarded up windows, the 6-lane traffic. Guess I am toying with the idea of everything being "a part of everything" without making one good or bad, but part of the whole. thank you for your thoughts.
Dream on! Oh, how I love the idea. And I would get to meet you and Kathy in person! How cool is that?
A big YES from me, girls.
An All-Inclusive kind of "nature". Thank you, Christine.
I love the rhythm to this. Wonderful pictures, too. Loved: braided horse mane and a pretty girl the same.
A poem for voz alta with rhythm and affection!
I looked up Voz alta, & found it means "loud voice"…and was referred to the 1968 student massacre in Mexico City, when student protestors leading a revolution for the workers were gunned down…all this reminded me of my own government doing the same, aka, four dead in Ohio, when university students were protesting the Vietnam war. Thank you, Dreaming, for inciting an idea for another poem.