Reduction

Mind and land, like an old married couple, finish each other's sentences. I shelter, dark and stiff and over-carapaced, under a bent, bleached-out cattail blade. There has been a reduction, an abstraction, a simplification. A great weariness arrives and settles in, a complicated fin d'hiver melancholy, like the thick mat on the meadow floor: dry and tangled on top, wet and rotten underneath.



I am photojournalist of an ice-encrusted, ruined world. The deposed queen resides in air, in exile with her crones in waiting. Sharp shoulders bear the dead king, thin as a pall, toward a blurred horizon.



Here there is no hunger and no food. Just a few threadbare categories remain; under scrutiny, they fall away to dust. Even love. Even God. Poudraillant says the musical notation in the score of Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time.



Light shining through dust. Through ash. Through a fast.



But a heart, like a story, lies beating under the mud. Even through thick bootsoles I can feel it shouldering upward, toward the big, blunt, low winter sun. Between heart and sun, my breath and the wind conspire. Help me, I pray, I am losing count.

One ? Three ? None ?



Something's hatching in the corner of my eye. I squat, knee and ear to ground. White and green rise through me, a spring gushing from toes to fingertips to the top of my head and beyond.

The lens: my narrow, last and least boudoir.