...when I see the blooms of an esperanza, I think of the French verb, esperer, to hope. From there, I think of aspirer, to breathe. And then I think of the english word, aspire, which in its way, is to hope also, to hope to be something of true worth. And I can't look at the blooms of an esperanza (which perhaps is a spanish word, or an italian word), without knowing the joy of yellow, yellow, yellow.

(By the way, the bloom in the middle photo is not an esperanza, but it snuck on board somehow, and it can stay.)

There is something beautiful in how a man or woman without desire for power or leadership handles the job when thrust upon them. They can shine such a brilliant and gentle light.

(Photo taken 8-7-12 at 7:10 AM Lafayette, Louisiana)

Driving from Austin, Texas to Lafayette, Louisiana the night of August 18, 2012, I took 12 pictures with my Sony digital Cybershot. Probably due to dim light and the speed I was driving, none of the images look like the eerie, beautiful skies I was passing through, but instead, look like some sort of abstract art. Some are just timed exposures of headlights and streetlights as the car was in motion - the colorful wiggly lines of light look pretty cool. But the image below had me flummoxed for some time. What the heck is this?!

Yesterday, with some relief, I finally recognized what I had captured. Perhaps you can see the blurred 100 on the right. This is an image of the tachometer and the speedometer, side by side, in the dash of my Honda Civic.

apocalyptic noise

advance, retreat
here comes the eyeless hurricane
the hint of theft
the nickel with the unfamiliar face

(she runs her needle
through the cloth
and doesn't count
the stitches)

the leaf blowers whine louder
TV warnings echo through the walls
cars whiz past
impossibly fast

(he grasps the handbars of his walker
and moves across the hardwood floor
at his own slow speed)

Lafayette, LA, 8-7-12

The sacred project in progress.

'...the combination of a clear night sky and a good compass together, many seamen believed, could also tell a ship's longitude. For if a navigator could read the compass and see the stars, he could get his longitude by splitting the distance between the two north poles - the magnetic and the true.

'The compass needle points to the magnetic north pole. The North Star, however, hovers above the actual pole - or close to it. As a ship sails east or west along any given parallel in the northern hemisphere, the navigator can note how the distance between the magnetic and the true pole changes: At certain meridians in the mid-Atlantic the intervening distance looks large, while from certain Pacific vantage points the two poles seem to overlap. (To make a model of this phenomenon, stick a whole clove into a navel orange, about an inch from the navel, and then rotate the orange slowly at eye level.) A chart could be drawn - and many were - linking longitude to the observable distance between magnetic north and true north.

'This so-called magnetic variation method had one distinct advantage over all the astronomical approaches: It did not depend on knowing the the time at two places at once or knowing when a predicted event would occur. No time differences had to be established or subtracted from one another or multiplied by any number of degrees. The relative positions of the magnetic pole and the Pole Star sufficed to give a longitude reading in degrees east and west.'

from The Illustrated Longitude
Dava Sobel
William J. H. Andrewes

What would you like to read? she asked.


to get closer he said.


Do you exist outside of my head?

Interstate Highway 10, 18 August 2012, unaltered

(20 August 2012, Lafayette, Louisiana)

crisscrossing patterns
of lace, love, and longitude

the time and location
of zero degrees

the lacemakers of Chantilly
stopped making the lace

when the guillotines
got in the way

love now so foreign
there was no more dream

love, longitude
and lace

high-arcing connections
between disparate topics

love, longitude
and lace. We ask

is this about physics
or politics?

Sometimes, it was hard to see the goal.

They'd been out to sea for a very long time, so long, they no longer could hold on to where they had been, or what adventures had come their way. Years passed. They became like sieves. There was no land, for surely had there been land, they would be on shore by now.

They dreamed of homes, of lives with different names. They dreamed of lions, of ravens and owls. They dreamed they were children; they dreamed they were very old. And every time they awakened, they were still on the floorboards of the boat, watching the gulls, the shearwaters, the fishes and man-of-wars. They watched the spout of water shooting from the back of a whale twenty yards away, the fine spray catching sunlight. They watched the pelicans dive into the sea.

she remembers
the noise the people
the scraping of chairs
the dropping of plates
the smell of food crumbs
tumbling to the floor
cold coffee
and spilled water
the sopping paper napkins

the photos - silent -
show no one at all

Huntsville, Alabama, July, 2012

every year comes a day
when there's such thing yes
as summer's end,
as fall coming this way. This morning,

the smell of autumn was in the august air...
it was in the morning this morning
riding the breezes.
Hotter than heck by mid-afternoon. I was in

Lafayette last week. I read a message
on a postage stamp:
'Let Nature Do the Work'
Today there was a fragrance; leaves

changing their minds; birds
finding insulated niches within the trees,
making love to the sky
from the highest branches

(photo taken 7-29-12 in Huntsville, Alabama)

when about to be absorbed into mayhem, they shifted gears; they slowed to a crawl or sped into a sprint, and the apocalypse rolled on without them....

I haven't seen an ordinary honeybee lately, but I do come across these bigger buzzers. This was the only bug I noticed within the stand. I have found them in Texas, too. Though unlike honeybees in that they're loners, this one one did seem to enjoy visiting the flowers.

The pictures above were taken in Lafayette, Louisiana on 8-7-2012.

will the words
be released will
they be recorded?
summer pensiveness
seeking fall,
the song of northern breezes
through the trees,
the sound of goodbye
hello goodbye?

he replaces
all the nuts and bolts
so nothing will fall apart -
Pink Floyd rings in
from beyond the door...
is that a crow disappearing
into disappearing woods?

(above image taken at Girard Park, Lafayette, Louisiana, July, 2012)

The words fungus and soil have been simmering in my head for a while now. I've read that funguses play an essential role in the health of earth, that they support many necessary contributors to rich loam such as insects and worms.

The soil in many parts of Austin, dry, hard, powdery, has seemed so depleted of life, and I'm seeing the same phenomenon here in Lafayette, Louisiana which also has suffered from severe, lengthy drought and other serious factors. I've wondered how one could help hasten the restoration of the soil.

So when I was driving down the road the other day, and saw a sign that read 'mushroom compost', I turned right into the parking lot to learn more. The fellow at the desk took me out back to see what mushroom compost looks like, and permitted me to take a picture. I held a clump of the dark, crumbly matter and felt its weight. I don't know that mushroom compost can save the day, but I suspect it could be of help, one way to reintroduce fungal growth to lifeless dirt.

Austin, Texas
March, 2012

Sometimes the people on Shoal Creek Boulevard walked, sometimes they flew. Sometimes they sped around and around the block on bicycles. Some were skateboarders and some wore skates. Some of the very young rode like royalty in their cozy strollers, some found their zone on motorcycles.

Like when speeding up or slowing down the spin of a reel of film, some things were visible to them only at certain speeds. When moving at a meditative crawl, the view was different than what they saw in the fascinating blur of high speeds.

Then, too, there were birds and insects flying about at visible speeds, and there were birds and insects that seemed to show up and disappear in a blink.