Over the last month or so I've been working on a chapbook of sorts. I made a selection of twenty-one of my own collages and wrote a sort of prose poem to accompany each piece. Here are two examples:
Outcropping
In the Blue Hills, rocks as big as
houses lie scattered where they fell out of the receding glaciers—some from as
much as a mile high—at the end of the last Ice Age, often broken into two or
three pieces from the force of their collision with the earth. Now they are surrounded by old-growth trees,
saplings, briars, blackberry bushes. The
air crackle-crisp, the sky a hazy blue. We stand looking down at the winter
lake glistening in the gathering dark, listen to the elders chanting as the Blue
Angel steps forward to offer a prayer.
Caballero
They rode by late in the afternoon,
covered in dust and sweat, trying to hold their heads up under the brutal heat of
the setting sun. We all sat in the shadows of the jacarandas and watched them
plodding stolidly toward the mountains in the west. The oddest thing was the
sound of the song they sang softly in some language we had never heard, a song whose
meaning we could only loosely infer from the fragments that reached our ears
intermittently, conveying a mood of weariness and resignation, along with something
like joy.
