our lady of the brown mirror

October 2, 2005

I went back to that cemetery in Breaux Bridge today. Not the white-washed cemetery beside the orange-red brick church by the big steel bridge on Bridge Street. That other, smaller cemetery, maybe a quarter mile down Main Street, by a second, smaller bridge beside a second, smaller church. The light was better today than the last time I visited Breaux Bridge and I wanted another portrait of a statue who lived there. Our Lady of the Brown Mirror, that's my name for her anyway.

the reflection of a bluebird in a window

Holy Calvary Cemetery

Lafayette, Louisiana

One could speak of the minor harmony that is produced by the vibration of one string against another as the ratio of their oscillations. It is a mathematical relation. String on string is sound and song is sound. The reflection of a bluebird in a window is an optical calculation. A blue pixel here, a blue pixel there, scientists make rainbows every day.

 

But what is song? Do songbirds cry? And if so, does it sound like a song? Down which side of what pane do whose tears drop blue rain? From which grew whose grim portrait? Who breathes there? What is one? What beats there? What is two? Those are more difficult questions.

a fine mender's fit craves measure

There is a moment in the making of every minestrone when a whole and happy bean surrenders its integrity to the lure of the surrounding soup. Twist a ring around a finger long enough – any finger, any ring – and it will come to begrudge its knuckle. And you will forgive X if it cannot remain forever sandwiched between W and Y. The water turns slowly savory and the shell falls away eventually tenderly.

(This title came to me in an early morning dream fully formed. It was preceded by three images: the bean in a soup, the twisting ring and the sandwiching of X. Only after I wrote it all down did I realize the logic behind it.)

island-hopping

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The human tongue is like the songbox of birds or the blowholes of dolphins. Nature, finding opportunity in the pliancy of anatomy, endowed these humble organs with the magic of expressiveness and the body began to talk.

Minds used to be more like islands lacking bridges between them. We traveled from the shore of one island to the shore of another only with great frustration and always with an unshakable sense that there was much left unexplored. There was always a between between us. Then tongue-turning turned into language, fashioning a magic carpet from the fabric of our mouths and now we are able to fly effortlessly from one mind to another, vaulting the murky waters that once isolated our souls.

real blank fruit

Photo: jetheriot

I was lucky. A wet box of photographs and mementos in an outdoor closet was the only damage I had from Katrina. This photograph was printed from a 35mm negative I had to pry apart from another negative.

a heart is not a valentine

In the solitude of a January morning, when its life on Earth has ended, a Christmas tree will undecorate itself, loosening the wire ties that twist the ornaments around its branches and packaging them in familiar shoeboxes between layers of folded tissue, being careful not to loosen the macaroni pieces arranged to resemble beards on the faces of three wise men.

religiously

A VICTIM of the exotic virus starving the tribe of its livestock and its fruit trees, the stunted, sickly apple tree in the cemetery at the edge of the village quivered with infestation and grew grayer with the fading of spring.