This dance needs no band, no lyrics, no occasion

This dance only needs water sun and skin to kick tempo, to count off a bob and weave between the ripples. Something more ancient than any ceremony quickens him, and we know it too.

Oh hi there.

Do you throw each other around at your table? Do you make games against gravity to pass the time? Mmm. Nummy thumb.

Which the greater mystery?

He wonders what they say to each other. And how in fact they say it. Just old enough to sense the implicit mutual awareness of the mallard pair, and just old enough to think of challenging his own bonding to his own species, he is caught in a moment, awakening to the mysteries of a world that works in silence beyond human need.

Oh Baskervilles! Your Hound!

Dog takes his humans out for a walk.

Strategies against loss

The light will fail, gloaming then dusk then darkness. The dog will grow infirm and require constant help. The daughter will become stout and inflexible. Each injury she imagines will take root and all the injuries imagined and real will surround her with the palisade of righteousness that prevents old women from seeing their own lawns after a while. Mom will drop in her tracks one day and be carted off to one side or the other of the information superhighway, to wither into binary senselessness. But before all these gnawings of insatiable fate chew through the moment, mom fends off fate. She stalls it a bit. She bags the shadows of the light her daughter shines upon her heart, and even the dog forgets his trajectory for the duration of this skirmish against time.

Is this even possible?

Can a dog sharper than a new pencil, a mother with a camera phone, and a child with the life force torqued high enough to conquer a whole city of inattentive adults...can these disparate brains and antagonistic appetites converge? There is a filament of will that extends invisibly with steel from the mother and knits these energies into a feral pastel tableau. Later dad will see the evidence upon the cell phone screen, and scratch himself discretely, too conscious of the dog needs that catapults him from his sleep each morning, too conscious of the intoxicating aroma of his wife's will, too conscious of his daughter's life force now launched like a green armada with pink sails against that silent nation, that future.

The tulip committee would adjourn its pinkness

The green cake, the crowd of bloomed coral flags, the lake a face of drowsy affection beneath the mother sky. We buzz among our built things, pitch boats and bread crumbs into the water, and ring the tulip mob with a cement collar. The breeze shudders a quick consensus among the fragrant daubs.

Spent ships, what labor does your sleep renew?

The canoes all spoon together in their sleep. They dream of children discovering the fragility of water. They dream of young men paddling grids of ambition across old lakes which become new with intense effort. They dream of girls about to join the cult of resignation, but resisting right up unto the day the oaths are made.

The dandelions don't move, but they seem like they are moving in constant arabesques at the whim of the sunlit breezes.
I would lie down among the canoes, and wake them to tell me their stories.

What shall I do now, that you have ignited me?

Oh you wanton wanton flames, you dissolute reproductive riot heads, you spendthrift blazes. You burn in me, and I run away toward my love, the fire of need making me transparent.

Do you believe that?

These uniformed men simply cannot believe how yellow the streetcar is in the May sunlight. They compare notes, and find nothing in their store of analogies or metaphors that can contain the vast yellowness of the car. It is yellow beyond pollen, beyond daffodil, beyond the heart of the sun itself. Things like this make their time together go faster, and leave deeper grooves in their memories.

Duck. Yuk.

The Mallard doesn't judge things the way we do. To me the green algae bloom and phosphate scum are disgusting side effects of human self indulgence. To the duck they are just opaque clumps of inedible dross, something to be avoided in the quest for fishies.

A speck of movement gives life meaning

For someone not in this picture, this speck with arms and legs is the meaning of life. He owns the moment in its entirety, and when it is spent there is no change or amount owing. Every step he takes creates a new country to explore, and the lever of his attention moves the world.

Fugitive moment

The dancer bows, the image-making daddy dances, the mom contemplates her future as the tethered anchor of the dancer and image maker. The musician strums chords to shape the bowing baby dancer's sense of time. The sense of time within the mother's breast accellerates. The daddy falls into the settings on his camera, lost in the project of making the present the past, proof against the future loss of innocence and memory alike. The moment spirals away from everyone. Only the baby dancer rides against the current of time upon her beats, pirouettes, and archaic hand gestures which remind the gods themselves what they have done to us, and will do to us again.

The cat competes. For everything.

I was writing my autobiography, and I had just gotten to a part about me at the Walker Sculpture Garden, when Leo jumped on the table and wanted his picture taken, so he could write his autobiography someday too.

Beneath the leaves beneath the sky

I was glancing around my back yard, sitting in a hand painted adirondack chair. The sky was spilling batts of cloud, the pond was cemented green by algae, the ducks had bred and fled. Looking straight up, I saw this jaunty pattern of serrated mulberry leaves.

The land of sky blue waters

This is Lake Harriet in the heart of Minneapolis. If you look closely you can see a skyscraper or two on the left.

Family ties to photography

Subject to the object in California

This tourist was surreptitiously taking a picture of a local girl.  I openly took her picture and his too, and got a better picture.  Notice the father and son, walking away from the camera between the subject and object of this photo.Notice the woman with the red bag.  Is she with the father and son?  Is the woman with the white cap the mother of the boy in the red shirt?   Ah, California, source of some of my favorite tableaux vivant..

Solitude and the game of life

Solitude is treated by many as banishment from one's own house party. You spend your precious moments alone scheming to get back into the spotlight. If you find yourself alone with nothing to do, remember this boat. It is floating, but not cut adrift. It is exposed, but protected from the elements. It is unused, but fit for use. Unmixed in purpose, it is perfectly itself.

Shadows in the sun's venue

A rain-washed day at Lake Harriet provides an opportunity to encounter the grey, reflective part of my soul. I am as excited about these images as someone else might be about blue skies, taut sails run up into a capricious breeze, and running paths crowded elbow to knee with hale achievers.
These unpopulated glimpses into the downtime of a playful city are not expressions of melancholy or anomie. They are in fact celebrations of the pauses between actions. There is color here, and the signatures of lives lived with attention to detail. It is the silence between passages, when the body rebuilds itself. The light falls more evenly and searchingly into every crevice, giving shadows their due.

At last

The parking lot of the Edina Byerlys provides an onyx ground to the acetylene after-shock of sunset. I meant to come out earlier to catch some full crimson glory dripping from the rough plaster clouds, but I took too long deciding among teas and cookies in the store. Now I stand transfixed by the dilute reflections of something imperial, ancient, and not for sale.

Late sun on spires

The day-glo spandexed cyclist puffs past a fairy-tale array of spiked roofs at Lake Harriet. The low sun is weak, but coaxes the frosted gingerbread into a sweet relief against the gathering rainclouds in a distant sky.

Levee against the tide

In the midst of the waning wildness of the park, some staff have crafted this weathered planking to bank the tide of wood chips, which are a make-shift grooming for the path. There is a sensible progression in this image from wildness, through make-shift, to craft. The craft weathers out. The makeshift will decay back into the fundamentals of the wild. The wild careens on, seducing those gentry who feel its wanton sorcery. They balk, the gentry do, and insist on grooming for their ensorcelled paths.

Soft, pale, defenseless

Soft pale defenseless mushroom is as fit as any armored giant, to the task of life. Underneath his cap, he recites the complex hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen lore of his ancestors, and brews protein or poison, according to his school. It is easy to trample the mushroom, but you must submit to their mortal variety a great patience and care in order to savor their company, and live to tell it.