Seattle Photo-Ol’ Timey
Month: November 2025
Two Friday Poems Around A Theme-Wallace Stevens & Seamus Heaney-Out Into The Modernist Night
Re-Statement Of Romance
The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself
And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,
Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,
That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.
Uhm…okay Wallace. Out into the modernist night…
Night Drive
The smells of ordinariness
Were new on the night drive through France
Rain and hay and woods on the air
Made warm draughts in the open car
Signposts whitened relentlessly
Montreuil, Abbeville, Beauvais
Were promised, promised, came and went,
Each place granting its name’s fulfillment.
A combine groaning its way late
Bled seeds across its work-light.
A forest fire smouldered out.
One by one small cafes shut.
I thought of you continuously
A thousand miles south where Italy
Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.
Your ordinariness was renewed there.
Seattle Photos-Color Practice
Hey, it’s what I got when I get the time.
—
Seattle Photos-Not On My Watch
Detective Harry: ‘Good light, nice drama. Way too much negative space. Don’t be afraid to put more in.‘
‘Read this poem and come back in a month.’
—
—What’s this poem about? What’s this got to do with winter?
‘My tab’s due…time to go.’
—‘Okay, Harry, all right…’
—
Blizzard
Snow falls:
years of anger following
hours that float idly down —
the blizzard
drifts its weight
deeper and deeper for three days
or sixty years, eh? Then
the sun! a clutter of
yellow and blue flakes —
Hairy looking trees stand out
in long alleys
over a wild solitude.
The man turns and there —
his solitary track stretched out
upon the world.
Seattle Photos-Bus Stop Abstract
I’m getting some photos available as prints, mostly by request.
Imagine you’re in a hotel lobby; your flight boards in two hours. Your pre-brain-chip gaze comes to rest upon this beauty.
‘I never look around. This was a good trip.’ ‘Nice design.’
‘Wait a minute…is that…? Oh yes…I SEE NOW. Yes…oh no…I…..I must change my life.’
‘At least it’s not shit.’
Foreground: Bus-stop etching on dirty glass. Background: Hand-painted cafe wall in early-morning light.
Seattle Photos-Still Life
I’ve always been fascinated by light. Whenever I can, I read up and try to understand Feynman diagrams or George Gamow’s ‘The Birth & Death Of The Sun.’ Long ago, we bought laser-pointers and played around with the angle of incidence and the angle of refraction.
Weird.
Painters have to represent light on a 2D surface with geometry, materials and technique. It takes years of experimenting with colors and color-mixing. Most of all, artists have to have some kind of vision.
It can take months to make a single painting…
Photographers ‘find’ instead of ‘make,’ deciding where to stand, and when to click the shutter. If you can’t see it in your mind’s eye, you probably won’t ‘see’ a good photograph.
But, you can always get lucky.
Luck helps.
—
Happy Veterans Day 2025
Thank you for your service.
Weekend Photo & Part Of A Poem By Theodore Roethke
The Long Alley
‘A river glides out of the grass. A river or a serpent.
A fish floats belly upward,
Sliding through the white current,
Slowly turning,
Slowly.
The dark flows on itself. A dead mouth sings under an old tree.
The ear hears only in low places.
Remember an old sound.
Remember
Water...’
—
Thursday Poem-Seamus Heaney
Storm On The Island
We are prepared: we build our houses squat,
Sink walls in rock and roof them with good slate.
This wizened earth has never troubled us
With hay, so, as you see, there are no stacks
Or stooks that can be lost. Nor are there trees
Which might prove company when it blows full
Blast: you know what i mean — leaves and branches
Can raise a tragic chorus in a gale
So that you listen to the thing you fear
Forgetting that it pummels your house too.
But there are no trees, no natural shelter.
You might think that the sea is company,
Exploding comfortably down on the cliffs,
But no: when it begins, the flung spray hits
The very windows, spits like a tame cat
Turned savage. We just sit tight while wind dives
And strafes invisibly. Space is a salvo,
We are bombarded by the empty air.
Strange, it is a huge nothing that we fear.
Seattle Photos-Around Town
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Seattle Photo-Faces On The Street
