Snow dusts the hills
Rice flour on sourdough crust
Endless patterns
In burnished bronze
No subject
No object
No meaning
The explorer’s
Essential pleasure
Existential textures
Snow dusts the hills
Rice flour on sourdough crust
Endless patterns
In burnished bronze
No subject
No object
No meaning
The explorer’s
Essential pleasure
Existential textures
I have to admit there are an overabundance of road pics in my catalogue, photographs in which various streets, highways, byways and gravel tracks from my travels serve as the primary subject of a landscape. Mind you, I’m not apologizing for that. We photograph and write about what we know and love, and I love few things more than being behind the wheel of a car (or pedaling a bicycle) through unknown country. Over 40+ years of driving and cycling I’ve amassed several hundreds of thousands of miles wheeling on just about every road surface imaginable.
Safe to say, I know roads.
Smooth gravel
Through sparse country
Makes me happy
A journey of a thousand miles
Begins with a centre line
My fear is always
More about the road
Already travelled
Than what is to come
I carry the past
As tragedies
And failures
Then project them ahead
Like road signs
Diverting me from a truer path
I remind myself
When checking the rearview
Acknowledge the tragedies and failures
Along the road once travelled
But leave them in the past
Then bring to mind
The triumphs and successes
Project these on every road ahead
As billboards of encouragement
I love a landscape best
Which is not so self-conscious
As to fear the domination
Of a cloud-illumined sky
Where once the road
Went ever on and on
The straight and narrow
A path long fixed
Now curves ahead
Promise us adventure
Through lands ahead unknown
The future far beyond
And I
No more or less the merry
For what is known and what is not
All are part the journey
Lingering
Above the peaks
One little cloud
Gone rogue amid
The overcast
She calls upon
The fading sun
Which does oblige
With warming light
Just before
Advancing night
The road takes me
Toward the golden light
Day fading into
Indigo night
The long desert drive
Doesn’t end
‘Til well after dark
So I stop before the dusk
Share with the Earth
Daylight’s final sigh
Long days
And excessive miles
On desert highways
Warp my mind
But it’s a good warp
Ripe with strange insights
As the desert strips away
All but the essential