Sebastião Salgado, Péninsule Valdés, Argentine, 2004

Paul Pepera

Wim Wenders, Union, Ludlow, California, 1983

Ed Freeman, Abandoned Restaurant, Victorville, California

Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes 

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

Watts Towers

The Jaguar by Ted Hughes

The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion

Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.

But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.

Because I could not stop for Death By Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death – 
He kindly stopped for me – 
The Carriage held but just Ourselves – 
And Immortality. 

We slowly drove – He knew no haste 
And I had put away 
My labor and my leisure too, 
For His Civility – 

We passed the School, where Children strove 
At Recess – in the Ring – 
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain – 
We passed the Setting Sun – 

Or rather – He passed Us – 
The Dews drew quivering and Chill – 
For only Gossamer, my Gown – 
My Tippet – only Tulle – 

We paused before a House that seemed 
A Swelling of the Ground – 
The Roof was scarcely visible – 
The Cornice – in the Ground – 

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet 
Feels shorter than the Day 
I first surmised the Horses' Heads 
Were toward Eternity –

The Cure, Primary

Alex Cornell, An Iceberg Flipped Over, and Its Underside Is Breathtaking

Global Warming by Jane Hirshfield

When his ship first came to Australia,
Cook wrote, the natives
continued fishing, without looking up.
Unable, it seems, to fear what was too large to be comprehended

RIP

Minutes by Denis Johnson

You and I- we agitate
to say things,to dress every gash
with a street address or a relative.
We are found in the places of transport at an hour
when only the criminals are expected to depart.

We are blind and we don't know that our mouths
are moving as we place a hand to stay
the janitor's mop- I'll tell you the story
of my life, you'll make a million-
blind and we don't know that our parents are dead

as we enter the photo-booths.
In there is the quiet like the kernel of a word:
in there everything we were going to say
is taken from us and we are given
four images of ourselves. What are we going

to do with these pictures? They hold
no fascination for the abandoned,
but only for us, who have 
relinquished them to the undertow
that held us, too, but let us go,

so that the hospitals opened like great vaults
for us and we stepped from bed to bed
on the faces of the diseased, the beloved,
moving like light over a necklace
of excruciations- I'll tell you

the story of my life,
you'll make a million...
this is what it means to be human,
to witness the heart of a moment like a photograph,
the present standing up through itself relentlessly like a fountain,

the clock showering the intersection with minutes
even as it gathers them to its face
in the so often alluded
to Kingdom of Heaven-
to watch one of those minutes open

like a locker and brandish a picture
of everyone we ever loved who drowned,
while the unendurable generosity of everything
sells everything out. Would you like
to dance? Then here, dance with the terror

that now is forever,
my feet are stumps. The band is just
outbreaking now with one that goes
all the evidence / the naughty evidence / persuades
the lovers endearing by the ponds /

the truants growing older in the sleazy arcades / 
there's no banishing / of anything / 
only con- / quering within / 
make it enough / make it enough / or eat
suffering without end

the mockingbird by Bukowski

the mockingbird had been following the cat
all summer
mocking mocking mocking
teasing and cocksure;
the cat crawled under rockers on porches
tail flashing
and said something angry to the mockingbird
which I didn’t understand.

yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway
with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,
wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,
feathers parted like a woman’s legs,
and the bird was no longer mocking,
it was asking, it was praying
but the cat
striding down through centuries
would not listen.

I saw it crawl under a yellow car
with the bird
to bargain it to another place.

summer was over.

National Museum of Natural History

Click below image to see large version

Hal Morey, Grand Central Terminal, 1930

Marvin E. Newman, Broadway, Believe It, 1958

Tom Waits, Clap Hands

Sane, sane, they're all insane
Fireman's blind, the conductor is lame
A Cincinnati jacket and a sad-luck dame
Hanging out the window with a bottle full of rain
Clap hands, clap hands
Clap hands, clap hands

Said roar, roar, the thunder and the roar
Son of a bitch is never coming back here no more
The moon in the window and a bird on the pole
We can always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal
Clap hands, clap hands
Clap hands, clap hands

Said steam, steam, a hundred bad dreams
Going up to Harlem with a pistol in his jeans
A fifty-dollar bill inside a palladin's hat
And nobody's sure where Mr. Knickerbocker's at

Roar, roar, the thunder and the roar
Son of a bitch is never coming back here no more
Moon in the window and a bird on the pole
Always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal
Clap hands, clap hands
Clap hands, clap hands

I said steam, steam, a hundred bad dreams
Going up to Harlem with a pistol in his jeans
A fifty-dollar bill inside a palladin's hat
And nobody's sure where Mr. Knickerbocker's at

Shine, shine, a Roosevelt dime
All the way to Baltimore and running out of time
Salvation Army seemed to wind up in the hole
They all went to heaven in a little row boat
Clap hands, clap hands
Clap hands, clap hands
Clap hands, clap hands
Clap hands, clap hands
Well, clap hands, well, clap hands
Oh, clap hands, clap hands

František Kupka, Synthesis , 1927-29

A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver

All night my heart makes its way
however it can over the rough ground
of uncertainties, but only until night
meets and then is overwhelmed by
morning, the light deepening, the
wind easing and just waiting, as I
too wait (and when have I ever been
disappointed?) for redbird to sing.

Nicola Perscheid, Ernst Haeckel, German biologist and naturalist, 1942