Red Shoes

You stood there
in the dappled light,
dark dress and jacket,
body slight.
You smiled - at me -
though years and miles
had separated us
from college lives.
You were sixty,
modest and well-bred
yet the shoes you wore
were crazy-apple red,
like our joy
each time we met,
bubbling into mirth
that so often went
untempered by
a proper etiquette:
we danced in rain
and sang duets
across the meadow
hemmed with trees
where you now sleep.
We jumped in leaves
and slid down
snowy graveyard hills,
shivering, exultant,
laughing still.
When, on that lucky day,
we meet again,
I expect red shoes and
laughter in the rain.

Pictures and Poems

Lately I’ve been checking out some other blogs, particularly the “Blogs of Note” selected by Blogger Buzz. I’m not sure why these particular blogs are chosen. Nor do I aspire to have Shifted Light added to the list, but I was curious to see what other people do with their blogs, and then I grew interested in what makes a blog “noteworthy.”

The answer was not what I expected. It seems that noteworthy blogs don’t need to have many words. About half of these blogs of note are dominated by large artistic photographs, explained or commented on by a few lines of text. It’s a pleasure to look through them – some of them are very polished, and I’ve even found a few that I’m now enthusiastically following. Though these photo blogs sometimes stimulate my creative juices, their written content is rarely meaty.

The photos in these blogs are often stunning. Some make me smile. Some remind me of places I’ve been or people I’ve known or things I’ve made. Some make me want to visit places I’ve never seen or try something I’ve never done.

This may be a sign of the times. We are surely a culture in the midst of change. Yet I find it a bit odd that so many of our most noteworthy communications are mostly visual. That the written word frequently serves as an annotation to a photo, not the other way around.

Yesterday evening while I was chopping green peppers and tomatoes for a salad, I listened to a man on the radio read a short poem by Kenneth Rexroth. It was a poem about love and death and the passage of time and there was so much truth and beauty in it that my eyes filled with tears.

I can’t remember ever seeing a picture that was so true it made me cry.