04 May 2007

...for now we are young let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see






I've been too busy grading papers and painting the house I moved into to get around to writing the landscape essay I promised, so I'm just going to post some shots I took while walking around West Radford last week. I've been neglecting the blog a bit lately, so I'm posting twice today--the first shots continue my ongoing laundromat series and the second shots are from the same section of West Radford. At some point, I plan on pulling together my best laundromat shots and making a book, so let me know which of these you like/dislike.

I made light of my own poem in the previous post, but Hughes' Birthday Letters is a moving meditation on his relationship with Plath, as the following poem testifies:

from "The Rag Rug"

Somebody had made one. You admired it.
So you began to make your rag rug.
You needed to do it. Played on by lightnings
You needed an earth. Maybe. Or needed
To pull something out of yourself-
Some tapeworm of the psyche. I was simply
Happy to watch your scissors being fearless
...
Whenever you worked at your carpet I felt happy.
Then I could read Conrad's novels to you.
I could cradle your freed mind in my voice,
Chapter by chapter, sentence by sentence,
Word by word: "Heart of Darkness,"
...
I dreamed of our house
Before we ever found it. A great snake
Lifted its head from a well in the middle of the house
Exactly where the well is, beneath its slab,
In the middle of the house.
A golden serpent, thick as a child's body,
Eased from the opened well. And poured out
Through the back door, a length that seemed unending

6 comments:

Karen said...

I'm a little bit in love with the last photo in this set. It reminds me of something, but I'm unsure what. I find myself wondering if it's an imagined familiarity because of that uncertainty. Anywho, I like it and you get an imaginary gold star. Well done.

I could cradle your freed mind in my voice
Thanks for sharing the poem. I enjoyed it a lot; it brought to mind more certain memories and allowed me to relive them in a new light.

Anonymous said...

these turned out well. i think the last photo with the two machines would benefit from eliminating the tile foreground, leaving the ceiling and the machines alone. the black and white distracts a little from the yellow stains and ceiling continuity that i like. the red couches are great too, but the pole... you like to separate your photos right down the middle, it seems. what's that all about?

Karen said...

I disagree with Laura. I think the tiles balance the photo quite nicely; without them, I imagine it would seem bottom heavy. I'm a bit surprised that she liked the red couches (are they couches-I thought they were folding tables). I really want to like that photo more. It has bright colors, mirrors, an interesting symmetry, all of these things that I generally enjoy looking at, but the photo just doesn't do it for me. She does bring up an interesting point though, why do you split so many of your photos in half?

Anonymous said...

folding tables for sure.

Karen said...

Who are you, Laura R.? I have a rather harsh mental image of you as a complete ditz, but I'd like to pretend that idea is innacurate. Care to correct it?

Karen said...

Agh! Feel free to revel in the irony of me spelling "inaccurate" inaccurately.