Nikon 105mm f/2.8D AF Micro-Nikkor

Lots of fun shooting Macro. This will be my favorite lens for awhile, but there is a lot to learn. The articles I’ve read said check the sharpness! The DOF is SENSITIVE…millimeters matter. I love too the great textures I’m going to get; Additionally, the opportunity to use digital photography for more than just recording the place: TEXTURES ROCK.

miscellany

addie bundren’s posthumous sermon revised

In a pew you can’t recline much;
not much leg-room either.
Soon they’ll be a few folk walking the aisles
like air hostesses on jetliners.
For now it’s the
woosh of words
like pressurized air motorin’
past ears
smashin’ against
the moral-sound
erodin’em—righteous flecks in a whir of flotsam
, ramjets, disintegrations
(((shhhhhhh))).

Some words are just shapes to fill a lack
—white-noise-words without pigmnet
; never-felt-words
; over-said-words that evaporate like contrails
miles behind the pulpit

(there’s a majesty in the clouds,
though; clouds
fill up to break loose).

It’s writ, The word became flesh.
Words that don’t incarnate
ain’t no good-words, just words that don’t reckon
the nimbocumulus overhead,
run in circles, diminish and
disappear in belches and accretions:
perish, putrefy like fishes—wash
away in the cloudburst.

how blessed is the man whose quiver is full

of sons to be set
loose against a world unsuspecting their
violence to conquer with the hardened
steel edges of surnames: I and my brothers
against my cousins, I and
my brothers and my
cousins against the world.
They longbow, long-shaft bodkins;
their fletchings the fast-flying mane
of Bucephalus as he tramples
Persian Immortals under
strong shanks and forearms
to crush with hock and girth;
to gallop indefatigable;
to gallop to the ends
of the world to the outer seas; to gallop
indefatigable to unfurl
a banner which reads:
“Fool sons to trouble mothers.”
The wise

disarm, the wise restore the shambled
world (bloodlines—serein
—which stipple
all things red), tender transfusions
of joy.

of aquanauts

Submersibles tethered: strangers
to see into the silence
the hidden coelacanth suspended
in the womb. They sing in high-pitched Doppler
to glint its scales; when nothing sings back,
Calypso’s monitors are black
(black is the sound of nothing there).

On the screen you are crosshatched—
mysterious like an echo: an obscure, half-told
fable forged by the clatter
of hammer banging anvil:
my Hephaestus, my Hephaestus, my ear,
my
smithy ear and you in the clanging.

In the black, black everywhere
of the nothing there you consider
lightproofness:
the immense aloneness in silence,
the comprehension of:
“you’re not alive, if not ever heard.”
You consider disappearance with

pantomimed screams; this is how
it is through liquid-filled lungs, but
the soul wills to be heard;
it wills to see the other side of nothing; it
utters, it utters, it utters instead
from the heart a constant pulse, pause and pulse
to look out as the ultrasound explores within.

+

+

When first you spoke you spoke to your mother but in secret
inside of a whisper of piss and
hormones. You said through that elongated pitch of uterus,
“I am the child you are with.”
She hushed her heart to hear
and when it beat again it beat doubly
loud with pounding capable enough for two.

There was no angelic heraldry, no
Christian name decreed,
no oracle, no promise, no calling.
If Gabriel was sent
he was sent with a diminished script: just a plus
sign at the end of a stick. Vacant:
your name, your gender, your temperament all
of which were answered
—simply
—hesitantly
—feebly—as,
“She’s pregnant.”

But for that plus I doubted.
But for that plus I
doubted whether
you existed anywhere but at the jointed breaths which
coupled pauses in between proposed names—perched
like a watchful spirit in constant peril.
An embryo. A fetus poised
like some unresolved sum that folds itself
into similitudes of commas clinging to the precipice
of speech—hanging
on each ill-formed name.

It takes a prophet to make a good name; how
else does one augur a child, pick through their interstitial tissues
with forceps, and read the arrangement of gallbladder and bowels
to eek out a suitable designation?
What ignorance, what frailty, what insults will we stain you with?

My mind is epinephrine: gravid with mitotic fears
that grow, divide and multiply in pathogenic blooms. I
fret that moment when the obstetrician
drags you from the birth canal into my fool
uncertainty: you—untouched,
infant pure,
but they’ll ask me for a name as the afterbirth bloodies
the floor and the doctors turn
expecting me to make your + into an equals.
That’s where life begins.
That’s where life begins in fallible, fumbling, sullied hands
and the appointment of labels.

grace in autumn

Snow globes have such a sad
reality; there’s never a moment
when a sun crests its heat
over plexi-glass ozone
to melt its delicate cold away.
It settles
snow-globe-slow
after a shake which scatters each particle
like the spectators at an opera house at intermission who float
back to their seats just
in time for the final act. It dusts
everything during that brief interlude
between the prolonged and deep silences
with ceaseless, long-lasting, abandoned
hope: a punctuation of each repeated fall.

When leaves drop in November there’s always a knock
at the door; someone who’ll sweep them neatly
into thirty gallon, black bags pulled
taut with bright red draw-strings to be carted away the very next day.
By December, already, we anticipate the Spring.

I’ve traveled often in the woods: noted that permanent
bed of leaves cast underfoot
(the ancient giants no longer nimble at the joint
don’t bend
to pick them up).
Come late summer they’ll still remain: deep
banks that shelter the decay.
In quiet the arbors
wait for the next season to stir the prolix of leaves
—the gossip of the trees.

I stood to watch the yard boy rake them into neat piles;
he was clearly of humble origin. He was strong and hard at work, reclaiming
each leaf from the threat of breezes. He sang gospel
at the wind.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound.
He kept sweeping up decay
How precious did that grace appear
when the leaves were raked away.
The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
but my decay was raked
away, bundled into bags and carted away.

disney 2008

in split times

i. A waterfall start

I never watched as the pistol was lifted.
I just hung there like a petrified
Icicle—
suspended:
Icy eyes filled up
By the black of a cinder track. I paused
(With an exhale of thought)
Attentive for the discharge
That would cascade our waterfall.
I can imagine the starter’s arm went up
To the same effect as Moses before the sea—waves quickened
into a wall;
We ran the rapids at its fall.

ii. The first split

Use-to
When I ran
There was a clear-cut beginning;
Now there’s
Simply a “get-going” sermon
Given by a second-rate motivational speaker
or
The digital read out of a bedside alarm
Calling the
Penitent to run
(So many cigars—
So much scotch—to confess);
So often, they’re
Just ignored.

iii. The second split

I think back to that time when I ran like Hermes dressed
in Nikes with swift
Wings in a flock of Hermes jolted
To flight by a gunshot.
To stride! To stride:
A liquid stride to sprint with brother wind. The
Measured miles converted
To the rhythmic strike of feet.
I think back to that time when I ran like
A rivulet chasing rivulets: perpetual as water to the sea.

iv. The last lap

The telephone poles
slowly
Pass me by
As though,
I move in claymation:
Each terse step
A twist to the armature that lifts argillaceous limbs
and sculpts their movements—
But with winces:
A kick and wince—
A strike and wince—
A thrust and wince.

The telephone poles
slowly
Pass me by;
As I—ungainly—strain
To catch adjacent frames:
Theirs the faster step,
Theirs the longer gait,
My leaden legs:
Logy like bleary eyes
That require
Extra thoughts to rise.

The telephone poles
slowly
Pass me by
As I recite in breathless whispers,
“Pace yourself.
Pace yourself.”
Each a sigh that tumbles off
The precipice of wheezes
And exhales
And drops to drowsy limbs
Which beat the concrete blocks
With the tumult of toddlers drumming un-pitched
instruments;
Their tempo—unsteady—falls:
From moderato to andante then
Largo.
And they stop.
But the streetlights
like giants
stride.

an ethos deprived: the missing category of beauty (part 3)

iii. Beauty as a Calling

The word poet we get from the Greek more precisely translated as “maker” or “creator”. How much more profound then are God’s first words spoken for us into the void and recorded by Moses in his primordial account. That first poetic utterance, “Let there be light,” did more than just paint an image with figurative language; it overran the void taking shape and substance: the idea became word, the word became reality. On that first day with that first poem He founded all poetry and art that would issue forth from His greatest poem: man. For so man is called in the New Testament, and so is man called to express His poetry.