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What light there was
I explored the art center early in the morning, before anyone (except for a very friendly ginger cat) was out. The chrome chair legs seemed to soak up what light there was.
Or maybe I just didn’t get the exposure quite where it needed to be…
Chicken Farm Art Center
San Angelo, Texas
photographed 11.24.2018
Dented table = memories
The instant I saw this Coca Cola table, I remembered a trip to Mexico and an afternoon snack beside a tropical river. That must have been an important day, as back when I thought I was going to be a poet (~2003, for those of you working on writing my biography), I wrote a poem about that same afternoon:
Between Cancer and the Equator
The hotel’s pink stucco façade –
faded from age and sun and inattention –
guards the narrow street.
Four Americans crawl
from a blue Ford
pushing their way through air
glutinous from just-ended rain.
Crossing the desolate lobby
to a jacaranda-shaded veranda
they sit on dented red chairs
drink tepid Coca Cola through paper straws
eat pineapple pan dulce.
Below them
a languid river creeps past
its thick water the same color as the pastry.
San Angelo, Texas
photographed 11.24.2018
Pan, at a cemetery in Central Texas
A conversation with myself, in the cemetery:
Me: That statue looks…weird.
Me: Pan? It’s a statue of Pan? What the hell?
(pause for photos)
(also pause while I thought about the character of Pan in Tom Robbins’s book Jitterbug Perfume, and how my friend Laurie and I co-wrote a poem about the book and some other stuff and how that poem had the memorable [!] lines “seemed only right for a woman who was fond of fucking around/with seriousness, sanctity, syntax.”)
Me: Why is there a statue of Pan?
Me: He’s a pagan god!
Me: Wait. Who am I to say he’s pagan? Do I get to decide that? Or is it just my own Judeo-Christian background showing up?
Me: Wait. How am I going to refer to Pan in my blog post? Can I say “pagan” or what?
***
I am sorry to had to see what goes in my head. I hope you can recover from it.
Fairmount Cemetery
San Angelo, Texas
photographed 11.24.2018
Tentacles and the toilet
The door was already open, so I had a clear view of this scene from quite a ways off. Not the usual thing I see in cemeteries, and not even the weirdest thing in this one. (Come back tomorrow to see what that was. You’ll [probably] be as surprised as I was.)
Fairmount Cemetery
San Angelo, Texas
photographed 11.24.2018
