portrait
Muse (Brancusi)
Builder
Over the half-finished houses
night comes. The builders
stand on the roof. It is
quiet after the hammers,
the pulleys hang slack.
Giants, the roofwalkers,
on a listing deck, the wave
of darkness about to break
on their heads. The sky
is a torn sail where figures
pass magnified, shadows
on a burning deck.
—Adrienne Rich, from “The Roofwalker”
Platforms
“My life is no longer pulled in different directions or tied to anyone or anything; it is closed in on itself in the silence of death. I turn off the light and shut my eyes. I feel the rhythmic movement of the train as it rolls into the unknown; this movement also brings me peace—the peace of an alibi. Not only am I separated from everything, but I am not situated at any particular spot in the universe: I’m just passing through. I have no more ties to the earth, no more desire or curiosity.” —Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day
(This shot is part “Visitors,” a new series of photographs taken in the Boston subway.)
Esperanzas
Ocean which I pushed up
with my fingers so I could touch
the orange sand below
and white mountain
which is not white but for getting
caught in the cold
Stay here where it is warm
and where the sun shines, for later
celestial garlands of dead light
will draw you into the cold for sure
—Joshua Beckman, from The Inside of an Apple (Wave Books, 2013)
(A post more personal than usual for me. Dedicated to my family.)
Counter Life
“Maybe it’s all just a hazard of midlife penury, I don’t know, but I rarely, if ever, sit in cafés anymore. Passing chatter, the general groan of a place, they no longer create that pocket of space I can enter, like a cave in an avalanche, and sit and wonder, wait it out, or not think at all. It’s just snow: the ambient sounds, the networked divisions of transit, a door swing, scuff of a shoe, the remnants of noise like the black of shadows in white light, waiting to be shuttled out by interruption. And if I am, on occasion, able to sit somewhere in public alone, that alone is borrowed like a shirt with my name sewn on it. Just there for someone to read back to me.”
—from “The Visitor”
Repercussions
“Through this reverberation, by going immediately beyond all psychology or psychoanalysis, we feel a poetic power rising naïvely within us. After the original reverberation, we are able to experience resonances, sentimental repercussions, reminders of our past. But the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface. And this is also true of the simple experience of reading. The image offered us by reading the poem now becomes really our own. It takes root in us. It has been given us by another, but we begin to have the impression that we could have created it, that we should have created it. It becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expression creates being.” —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
(For my ongoing series of photographs of people reading in public.)
Squall
“…the way a road
can seem to tease a coast, tracing the littoral,
feinting into and away from the curves it owes
and takes as its own, an old game of shores
and edges, sometimes wild with sprays of phlox,
aligned elsewhere with mist, acts of rising
made low, burning off into bluffs…”
Images and words (excerpted from “Peninsula”) by © Chris Bronsk 2014.
Pike and Pine
The preacher preached the sermon
Sinners bow their heads
Sometimes I feel so alive
I wish I was dead
—Chuck Prophet, “Automatic Blues,” Age of Miracles
(for an occasional series on reading in public)
