e. flom ||| 35mm + poetry

Land | Water | Food | Film | Poetry

[e-flom]

It’s been some time since I’ve posted anything to this feed, but as I pivot my life from comfort and stillness to movement and the unknown it seems time to share. Film from recent travels to Oregon and Washington.

[e-flom]

Honey

Honey, the night I heard you leave this place

was a soft paw on a screen door nudging,

an oh, busy boy, hush your click-clack. So

I fumbled the fridge for fish and water,

a dowry of pond to please, like tea or smoke,

thunderheads ready to open a river’s mouth.

Rain fell hard that night, pushed pigs out pens

with beds of garlic still dreaming of drying in sugar

shacks. No, really! My dear friend, whitey tighties

and boots, hauled those pigs from burnt brush

doused by open dam, canoed field to field past onion

skulls and ground nests through the neighbor’s

front door, to the island in the kitchen where

she waited, chrysalis in a storm, moon behind

a cloud. A single flash and clap is enough light

for even the darkest nights. How will you know

the path home? Wayfinding like honey in moss,

golden drops shining through webs of earth

and flood water. Flood water stirred with silt

and shit, turned a lake so red that even

our satellites told us so. But honey, I got started

with you and your leaving, a leaving, I confess,

not like the one I got going on but, again, more

like a paw on a screen and, really, I mean this too –

when I heard the news I stepped out to smoke, stoop

support saddled beneath my ass, streetlight hum

and cricket chirp holding it down when up walks this cat

louder than the lot. Honey, you see this is where

the fish comes in. We sat, the cat and I, the sound

of chewing and lapping mixing with night, quieting

the hunger to leave this place for at least a little while.

[e-flom]

Bikes, bridges, babes.

[e-flom]

Onion Skull Dreams, etc.

I know this couple who live out beyond the Giant’s Knuckles, who wake every morning with, or without, the sun and work until their backs are broken.

Out there there is a fall that always goes your way and out there you can find the mandarin moons and the Milky Way weddings and the weariness of lover’s thought.

From there I watched the geese, the leaden flutter of migration, fly above me. And oh! What praise they sang for the onion harvest.

What praise I sing for the onion harvest.

In those beds I remember my dream about you. How you smiled and passed and that was all.

Some day someone else will be digging through that soil and they’ll pull your skull up like an onion and they’ll say, oh! What praise we sing for this beautiful boy.

What praise I sing for you beautiful boy!

What praise I sing for the hermit couple!

What praise I sing for the onion patch!

What praise I sing for the burdened geese!

What praise I sing! What praise I sing!

[e-flom]

D.I.Y. Winter Blues

In some sort of morning haze we drove by that white-haired widow, sweeping snow from the sidewalk. She knew well that it would not put grass between her toes, no, but it would make it all the nicer to walk along.

Do you think she knows the wind? Do you think she will be back out, each hour, broom resting upon her shoulder like a rifle?

I’ve since traded in my own guns for a small bag of tinctures. It was really more of a disarmament and subsequential search that left me fumbling through the snow. But now I can hear this bird, fallen from its branch, submerged somewhere in the frozen flora waiting for spring.

Its little whispers aren’t for me but I’ve started to build a nest anyway in the breast pocket of each of my shirts from the hair you left behind. Sometimes I wonder if it was the indifference of the winter wind that sent you back to the desert.

Maybe someday in the rays of some morning sun as I’m dusting the snow from the steps of our porch I will find that bird and I’ll bend over to open up the small pocket of my shirt and let it hurry in, knowing that it will not put grass between our toes but it will bring you closer to me.

[e-flom]

Auction Day: Foley, MN

Ridding ourselves of the things we thought we needed.

“The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.”  GRETEL EHRLICH, ‘The Solace of Open Spaces’

[e-flom]

Our Village Community Garden, Frogtown, St. Paul, Minnesota.

“We are dealing with life itself, so the first place we get power is by aligning ourselves with the forces of life. That is why the act of seed saving is such an important political act in this time. And that is the part that is linked to self-organizing—organizing yourself to save the seeds, have a community garden, create an exchange, do everything that it takes to protect and rejuvenate the seed. But at this point, industry is hungry to have absolute control. They will not tolerate a single farmer who has freedom in his seed supply. They will not stand a single seed that grows on its own terms.“ -VANDANA SHIVA

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-to-eat-like-our-lives-depend-on-it/vandana-shiva-freedom-starts-with-a-seed

[e-flom]

Mi amiga, Rita, is an amazing pastry artist. 

[e-flom]

We drank Tecate, smoked cigarettes and split wood. Portraits of a spring day spent together.

[e-flom]

Double exposures for the spring. Spring! Spring!