A gray day has depth. “Let’s just walk right into it,” I tell the dogs. When we lose sight of home, the trees and fields in the deeper gray reflect thin light oddly, becoming shades and shapes of peculiar beauty. The dogs are happy to keep right on going into the crazy day, deeper, and…
I walk the path through the little forest all the time. The dogs criss-cross, proudly treeing squirrels. Cows graze just over the ridge. I am so close to this place I can change it with my mind, round bends to walnuts and elms lit up with blues from my eyes. Some days, when the wind…
The dogs like the chill but suspect the leaves hide everything. The squirrels run from tree to tree. Even the hawk, circling low, scans with severer intensity. Here is the cool site of dissolution—the fertile warmth breaking down, growth going to dust. I think the autumn wind is ominous, swirling its way around the sad…
I should pity the white flower. Even a pansy adds color to the world. The common mugwort, too. The bittersweet nightshade. What life does the giraffe with a short neck live? The whippoorwill with a soft voice? I suppose the white flower is a flower in this minimal way, a subtle presence in the whoosh…
Wind blows the mist halfway up Murray Street, and I’m wet with the falls before I see them. People line the railing to see the fast water crash continuously, loudly, mist flying into the bent light. Colors hover over the scene. Colors rush from the water dropping through the sunlight. A boat drives plastic-covered tourists…
ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM, TORONTO Five intersecting crystals crash into Bloor Street, and people walk by as if nothing has happened. The chaos of angles and grids, the canted planes, the force with which the perfect shapes enter the earth . . . these are not from our world. I stand and look at the impossibility…
“Get the furniture!” Chris says. The bonfire is wide and tall. Two guys head over to the side of the carriage house and grab the two-seated rocker, rustic, mountain made. It starts to twist apart as they carry it. “You sure?” “Don’t ask her!” The two swing the rocker back and then up over the…
Tourists head through the dark ballroom for the terrace. I check the grain in the wooden walls, vertical, pointing to the tall, coffered ceiling and the grid of chandeliers—a dozen of them, with hundreds of faceted crystals beaming light. I turn myself around in the center of the space and think of dancers, chins up,…
The plaza, the pyramid, the escalators—the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame wants to be important. Inside, visitors pass each other awkwardly, riding up and down. The view from the café across the tubular trusses to the gift shop below is dramatic. The costumes of living and dead inductees hang next to each other on…
The storm cloud moves in so fast that the sun is still bright to the west. When the rain starts, I head out to the deck and stand under the eave. The drops are huge, flashing light against the heavy leaves of the black walnuts. The big cloud is dramatic. Then the rainbow, faint at…
G Bebs / Photographs 