Invitation; possible Artist's Statement to accompany a group of photographs.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/166266894@N05/albums/72157710789695136

More than once in the slow stroll through this community of images I have been approached by homeowners and their neighbors to ask, not with overt hostility but with clear apprehension, “Why are you photographing my house?” These moments could easily have given rise to my own defensiveness, my own diatribe about my first amendment right to photograph wherever I damn well please, but the truth is I’ve been asking myself that very question, over and over again, for months. I've come to take this question as an opening of a door rather than a circling of wagons. In return, I present the opportunity to join me in this ongoing conversation in my head, plumbing together the mystery of inspiration in the chill of alienation.

The first tickle of inspiration came to me disguised as the irresistible scent of fresh urine at the base of a telephone pole somewhere in the Arbor Lodge neighborhood in North Portland. Luckily, I had my trusty pup, Sadie, to recognize it and to make sure I lingered over it until I realized what she was trying to convey, that that moment in time and place was precious, but would only so speak for a short time. There was an easy beauty on the surface that gave shelter to its transience and fragility. Very soon, the flowers would lose their petals to make way for the next summer wave, when other flowers would take hold. The kid's bicycle would grow another layer of rust in its gears, another year of tangled vines among its spokes. Decorative trinkets would remain at their posts on the sills and railings or they would fall. The shadows would seem to pause but forms would slowly change, erasing some, stretching and deepening others. Some visits I would find things in perfect alignment for the making of an image; other visits would plead with me to return, perhaps at high noon or sunset, to see how the changed light or the passage of another year would create another image entirely. "It sounds like your talking about people," one fellow mused.

It sure does. The forces of nature, the effects of time and the passage of life, the tension between openness and vigilance, authenticity and facade, trust and fear, all are familiar to me, as I slouch, year after year, ever forward. I have come to embrace the Butoh dancer's search for beauty in the rubble of injury, exhaustion, decay. (I make no claims of whether one schooled in actual Butoh dance would recognize the claims I advance here. Most of my thoughts are scraps from here or there, stitched together after the fact.)

These images are culled from fall 2018 - fall 2019, curiously also covering the months of my first stay of any length in a nursing home. In the known world, age is defined as the distance from birth; in the nursing home world, age is quietly known by the nearness of death. As I review these images I remember and connect with them and they among themselves. Where I find homes of almost Germanic precision, I remember life as a curled body in a world of straight lines. Age slowly takes its toll and in the image as in my heart I find cast-off auto parts and forgotten toys. Seen from the end, life is a jumble of disparate objects, textures, shadows, broken lines and soothing curves, haphazardly thrust upon and against each other. Drift among boughs of light laden with the sweet fruit of sadness. But still, laugh or cry, make a sandwich and go for a walk. That part is up to you. Keep your eyes open. Life only lasts for a minute or two.

Make peace.

Make peace with this.
    with sadness,
    with bruises and blood,
    with long, lonely roads,
    cancer and cold, blue hospital rooms,
    sunset and a moonless night
        that never ends.
Make peace
    with the creeping decay of her brain
        in her body
        that can't sit still.
with your wife,
    who will never understand.
Change what you can,
    but know you can't change
        anything.
Make peace with that.

Beautiful and Successful

Today my wife sent me a note.
She is feeling beautiful and successful.
I am feeling diseased and despondent.
But is that something you say to someone
who feels beautiful and successful?
No, it's not.
And I don't.
And my silence echoes in her happy house.

The Old Man and the Dog

The sound from the dog's throat,
a throat not designed
to wail or shriek,
not designed
to scream
through a froth of blood.
The man's soul hesitates,
hovering, just touching
the hot black road.
The sound cuts him to ribbons.
He floats, waiting for the quiet dark
that never comes.

Armistice

Life, you jackbooted brute,
I concede.
I will open my mouth
and let slide
my filleted friends and fellow travelers,
chickens and carrots and such,
down my gagging throat.
I will tilt my face to the sky
and pull hard at the air,
folding my scorched lungs
but not flinching or fighting
the flow of oxygen,
though it makes the fire burn so damn hot.
And water, cool and sweet,
the perfect balm, I will divert
with a sly flap of my epiglottis,
to pool uselessly in my knotted gut.
I will sit on the porch
with Seligman's exhausted pooch,
as the sun casts her shadows across the yard,
and we will wait quietly
for the next jolt.

Late Night Lights

So lovely, distant lights bent and refracted through a fresh splash of tears. Such a shame that the cost of the ticket is unendurable sadness.

Wormy Scat and Bramble

My consciousness was established in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the farmland outside Middleburg, Virginia, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a complicated childhood, and nature was my refuge.

Things that I remember.

The springtime celebration of aspen leaves fluttering in the breeze; the invasion of tiny helicopters from the old oak trees along Goose Creek in the fall.

Hot fields of goldenrod and thistle buzzing with rusty grasshoppers and horseflies.

Tufts of animal fur in the abrasive bark of the black locust trees.

Peeling the buttery smooth bark from the sycamore trees and making little canoes to float families of bugs down the creek.

Deposits of grey, wormy scat.

The white-tail deer who would linger outside the goat pen in the dusk. The deer wanted to get in and the goats wanted to get out.

Cutting paths through the chaotic bramble on the hillside above the pond.

The weightless clutch of their tiny feet when chickadees would land on my hands to take sunflower seeds from my palm.

The friendly song of the bob whites, though they were too shy to ever let you see them. The wailing geese that brought Bob Alexander thundering through the brush because he thought dad was drowning in the pond.

Blacksnake stretched out on a hot, flat rock, its belly bulging.

My whole stringer of bluegills and largemouth bass eaten to their gills by a snapping turtle the size of a hubcap.

The earthy smell of my hands after I’d spent the afternoon steering a patient box turtle down the corridors I had carved in the weeds.

The frantic braying of the dogs when they treed a gopher, and the sharp crack of Mr. Pearson’s .22 that spun his fat body off the branch and to the ground with a dull thud. The disappointed dogs dragged their tongues back up to the porch, where they lay on the cool stone patio snapping at the horseflies.

“You ain't got a gun?” Mr. Pearson asked, scratching the scalp under his Massey Ferguson baseball cap. “This ain't like the city, now. Y’all need to have a gun.”

Also from Mr. Pearson, “You ain't need be ‘fraid of no niggers. They ain't no more harm than old Shep here,” he said roughing the ears of his grey-eyed and arthritic hound. “I can tell her, Now you go on up to the house and sit on the porch and I’ll be along shortly, and she do just that.” But that’s an aside.

The tangled mass of squirming babies that spilled from the guts of the bloated black rat snake when Joe McCormick ran over her with his tractor.

The smooth cove where the two huge trunks of the live oak tree came together that seemed perfectly sculpted to cradle the body of a young boy seeking shelter from a troubled life.

The frantic, slimy tadpoles held between cupped hands in the shallows. The impossibly quick backwards escape when the crayfish saw the shadows of your hands hovering overhead.

Skulls of possums and rats in the dusty crawlspace under the abandoned house. Tracks of deer, red fox, bobcat, coon and possum crisscrossing soft mud or fresh snow. Following deer tracks to the stands of spicebush, where would flock clouds of metallic blue swallowtails. The deer would chew the bush to its nubs, the fat, bright green caterpillars like sweet bits of fruit.

The shards of busted out window glass under my pale thighs when I slid across the seat of the old sky blue pickup truck that sat abandoned, tires rotted flat, sunk to the axles in the McCormick’s back field, cows the size of elephants stretching through the vacant window and rubbing me with their snot and slobber. I couldn't understand how they could let flies walk on their eyeballs. Mud daubers with their stingers stretched out behind buzzing against the windshield.

Spending a summer week building a dam in Aldie Creek, and then finding that the beavers built a better one overnight.

The exuberant acrobatics of the swallows at dusk. Spastic bats flopping around, shadows against the blue black night sky. The glorious luminous yellow and green Luna Moth pressed flat against the stone wall by the back light at “damn near midnight”, so said the grown-ups.

Translucent egg sacs under the branches of the fir trees.

Salamanders exploring the foreign territory of my hands and finding nothing leaping back into the creek.

Ant colonies like huge, moth-eaten quilts of sand and twigs spread out in the prickly hot sun.

Conical mounds of clay, miniature volcanoes spewing lava of nervous fiery red ants. If you stood still to watch, they would leave burning welts up your calves.

Waking up from dozing in the soft, damp weeds where the creek snuck under the barbed wire fence into the Alexander’s farm, chiggers chewing holes in my crotch and pits.

Churning bramble, bright with tiny flowers or drooping with dark fruit. Harvested berries with pricks of blood, honorable wounds for a heavily seeded pie. Digging sassafras root for its sweet summer brew, wild asparagus from the dry ditch along Aldie Dam Road.

Civil war battlefields of fat poke berries, who would spill their bright crimson blood into the sandy clay when sticks and pebbles flew.

Clusters of monarch butterflies battling for the pink milkweed flowers.

Oily rotting seed husks around the base of the black walnut trees that would make tomato plants wither and die.

I'm old now. The trails are paved. I stroll along, hands clean, remembering how it used to be.