desert needing the rain not meant to complain an inch on the ground still coming down looking at camera dropping doing some cropping followed by a sun painting while it’s still raining . . .
enough of the rhyming I feel cheap forcing rhymes knowing my fans will be screaming from empty bleachers. I seek solitude on the patio porch smelling the desert air in its creosote freshness seeking to share a quote from the Billy Collins poem Marginalia —
“. . . if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written ‘Man vs. Nature’ in the margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward.”
DoubleTake Special Edition Cover Photo by Kevin Bubriski: Top Right Photo by Peter Turnley, Bottom Right by Kevin Bubriski
OBITUARIES
These are no pages for the young, who are better off in one another’s arms,
nor for those who just need to know about the price of gold or a hurricane that is ripping up the Keys.
But eventually you may join the crowed who turn here first to see who has fallen in the night, who has left a shape of air walking in their place.
Here is where the final cards are shown, the age, the cause, the plaque of deeds, and sometimes an odd scrap of news – that she collected sugar bowls, that he played solitaire without and clothes.
And the end is where the survivors huddle under the tin roof of a paragraph, as if they had escaped the flame of death.
What better way to place a thin black frame around the things of the morning – the hand-painted cup, the hemispheres of a cut orange, the slant of sunlight on the table.
And often a most peculiar pair turns up, strange roommates lying there side by side on the page – Arthur Godfrey next to Man Ray, Bo Diddley by the side of Dale Evans.
It is enough to bring to mind an ark of death, not the couples of the animal kingdom, but rather pairs of men and women ascending the gangplank two by two,
Surgeon and model, balloonist and metalworker, an archaeologist and an authority on pain.
Arm in arm, they get on board then join the others leaning on the rails, all saved at last from the awful flood of life –
So many of them every day there would have to be many arks, an armada to ferry the dead over the heavy waters that roll beyond the world,
and many Noahs too, bearded and fiercely browed, vigilant up there at every prow.
— Billy Collins
CHILDREN’S EXPRESSIONS
“Yet again, as we considered what certain youngsters had to offer the eyes and ears of others, we recalled the words of a New Jersey pediatrician, William Carlos Williams, as recalled by his son, William Eric Williams, also a pediatrician of America’s Garden State, just south of the Manhattan skyline:
“Dad would come home from his house calls {to 9 Ridge Road, Rutherford, where both those does lived and practiced medicine} and he’d be excited, we could see — his face glowing with the light a kid had given him: something said, something drawn. He called those kids him teachers. ‘They don’t miss a trick, and there’s little that passes them by.’ We’d nod — glad to see and enjoy dad, the ever grateful student, saluting with all his heart the boys and girls, ‘the young writers and artists of America,’ he called them, who would always get him going so much.”
Sarah Himmel, fifth grade, Newman Elementary School, Needham, Massachusetts
This past Sunday, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins was in Tucson for a University of Arizona Poetry Center event.
Having Collins here is draw enough, but the event drew national attention on NPR because of a precocious
three year old’s (Samuel Chelpka) YouTube video reading the Collin’s poem, “Litany.”
Samuel’s video reciting the Collin’s poem by heart has more than 320,000 hits, a lot more than the more than 93,000 hits Collins has received reading “Litany.”
Computer Painting by kenne
Senna covesii, aka Desert Senna (September 25, 2014) In Molino Canyon — Image by kenne
Sandhill Cranes Coming In for a Landing at Whitewater Draw In Southern Arizona — Image by kenne
