Ah, archives, your fragile treasures await our quests of conscience. Little images, long forgot. These white carrier pigeons headed to the Russian front, their brot-und-wasser now away long gone, their Nazi chauffeurs fore to aft ashed to ashed, and then dust-to-dusted. Oh! What ho! A resurrection! Here we are, in the 21st century, and...
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emotions are conditions / conditions can be adverse / adversity does not create compassion / compassion is an emotion /
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At a certain age, my bones began stretching out far and fast. I uncannily evolved from a compact creature to a spindly, spidery sort of being. Fast-growing bones are searing – a kind of carbolic burn. Chemical, electric, and primordial. All appendages were tense and unpredictable. The skin attempted to bridge each day’s new...
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I must again mention Andrew Joron’s splendid Cry At Zero: “Pulling apart the lips of a white page reveals a curious network of fine bones, like those of an abstract bird…” (Fate Map, p. 21.) As though reading is an archeological exploration of anatomy, an intimate violation, an intrepid excursion into a private civilization...
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Here is another collaborative picture-poem between me and brother-of-Bumblemoth in Germany, Paetrick Schmidt. I wrote this for him in deep winter, in Strasbourg, a sweet city of spirits and smoke. It was a dreary and delightful day of crystalline drizzle. A thousand layers of wool were not enough to block the cold, and yet...
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Pigeons can recognize themselves in mirrors. Humans think we can as well, but it’s possible that we recognize what we look like, but not who we are. This battlefield photograph from the National Archive of the Netherlands documents a British soldier releasing a carrier pigeon from a tank on the Western Front in France....
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The creation of artwork is the creation of a wormhole – one...
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My Baltics body of work has become a big nest, with many eggs. Here is one from the “warbirds” egg – a companion piece to last month’s carrier pigeon picture. Last time it was a Purim picture, and this one is for the Vernal Equinox. This image is a sketch for a seriograph I’m planning...
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When at sea, I like to station myself at the prow. I like the way the word sounds, with all the shaping required by the lips. Not all words require such effort to utter, and this one also enjoys a bit of propulsion. It’s a word that sounds like what it is: moving through...
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Here is a meditation piece for shabbat. This carrier pigeon brings its HAPPY PURIM message to you one day early! It has travelled from a 20th century, war-torn Purim, on a day when the Allies were dropping carrier pigeons into France in an attempt to communicate with the struggling resistance movement. This is a Nazi...
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The Pinacates is one of the most ferociously beautiful places on Earth – it is within the lands of the Tohono O’odham tribe. It’s part of the gorgeous Sonoran Desert, just south of what is currently the Arizona-Mexico border but for thousands of years before colonialism were the open lands of the Papago or...
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I wonder what migratory birds think of Los Angeles. Perhaps they felt as I did in the Muslim villages of North Africa, where I spent days without seeing another woman. Today I witnessed the fleeting migration of miniature birds the color of egg yolks and mandarin oranges. Some alteration in the angle of the...
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