Wisconsin

Moments like this one

when I’ve invented another

poem, which she, too, loved

to do, moments like this,

I miss her so—that my breath

leaves me, and the sudden

immense weight of sorrow

sinks me like a treasure chest

to the ocean floor. Sometimes

I sit down here quiescent as sand

and seashell fragments. Sometimes

I weep, waking the swaying anemone.

Moments like this it takes a long time

to resurface, my body

racing ahead of me

toward daylight.

Ward Smith

My first happy running day in a while. Well, not really happy, but getting close. I rode my bike to the cemetery, parked in the grass and ran loops for 35 minutes, 10 minutes longer than last time. After the run I did 30 minutes of hard looping on my bike.

35 minutes was enough to make me feel that I actually did some running work - it felt so good to be running under the sun, getting warm enough to remove my gloves. My knee was a little wobbly at times, but 35 minutes of running is 35 minutes of running, regardless of how it is achieved. Even if I don't improve beyond this, at least I can achieve the rhythm and beauty of motion - I was born to run, it is in my blood. Without it a part of me is dead. I will always be out there, no matter how ill or injured, trying to get into a running groove. I love it too much to let it get away from me.

Yesterday I decided to tone some of the recent darkroom prints. I improved some, degraded others. It is always a risk. Pictures that I am completely satisfied with I won't tone or experiment with - a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush, as the cliche goes.

No darkroom work today.

On my 15 minute walking break at work today I was stopped by an old glove laying on the ground. What is it about old, abandoned gloves? Unfortunately, per Rachel's love letter, I no longer carry her camera around with me everywhere I go. So, I just had to gaze, and move on.

Old Glove

Printed a few years ago

Staring at that glove today reminded me of Aaron Siskind :

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever . . . it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

Aaron Siskind devours the landscape

The last few days I have been printing negatives from my first year of photography. I was 25. Young, energetic, filled with fire. I believed there was nothing that could escape my widened eyes. It was all there, laid before me like an exquisite meal waiting to be devoured by someone who had not eaten for 3 days.

Siskind was right, film remembers the little things. Looking at the details of the prints, I am amazed at the fine lines, the sharpness of everything. The camera I was using was a 1960's Yashica, which my parents picked up at a garage sale for $20. It did not have a view finder, and I found out soon enough that if I leveled everything just so, the horizontal line would always lean down a few degrees from left to right. I learned to compensate by tilting the camera before pressing the exposure button. The lens was brilliant, though, capturing all that detail and sharpness, still sleeping in the film, 17 years later.