from Startles

 August 15, 2025

“Nothing in it can transform grief into mourning,” Roland Barthes writes of The Photograph. It’s his photo of his mother as a child, one he doesn’t reproduce in the book. I wrote “morning,” thought “meaning,” surrendered to “mourning.” Is grief then aura, the once only mist that chills our face, dampens our shoes? He refuses to reproduce his photograph, for his spectator would not even grieve.

I balk at the idea that photography is more allied with death than painting is. If the scene is Impressionist, the painting is dead, not to be reproduced by any but the most derivative of artists. But between the painting and us, light’s transformative; we can see the world as painting without wanting to use our own brush. The light from my dog’s flashlight tail renders the grass beneath her more green. Repetition need not be reduction.

I check my files to make sure last year’s wedding occurred, now that the marriage is over. We played our roles in their happiness, but not their later suffering. The public privacy of social media has been edited to take out joyful content. My husband still throws a lasso, badly, at the ranch. I can laugh at that, both as what it was and as its memory.

Look at the father before, and the father after, the infant before and infant after. Gaza photos cause us our own pain; they demand that we act. Social media is so often an act we can’t see through this screen, or we don’t want to. The man’s face, too, has died, though he still holds his dead child up. It’s not that I want to theorize photography, but that it offers me a lens.

The lens is limit. Limits can be wit (the lily looks like a Pac man eating plants) or it can be horror (he cannot get outside the photo of his dead infant). The frame frames him, but also us. The frame contains a wave, a hurricane, an erupting volcano, but our expansiveness offers us fear. Context is space is freedom from the frame, not ease.

But a photograph lacks context, always, that is not description in words. It’s hardly worth a thousand of them, if you don’t know where it’s taken. It’s taken me away from my sunny room, my sunny mood, my cats, my dog, and onto a dying strip of land. Or a memory one wants so much to erase. Her father offered her to men over his CB radio; only she can see it like a photograph, which is not memory but shock.

For Dogen, all time folds into this one time. To time, Dogen was an annoying teacher, taking the sting out of it, letting it fall like a tent when the pegs come down. Halfway into its fall, tent echoes mountains, their vertical, etched valleys. There was a moment, once, when I got clear of this. Did you?

J acts out

"Yo, Susan!" I saw a man heading toward me across Hui Kelu. "You're awfully dark today," I said to J (as it was he). J usually radiates pinkness beneath his short ginger hair, is often shirtless, but today he was wearing a black shirt and navy shorts. "How are you?" I ask.

 

"Same as you," he said, scrunching his face. "I grew up outside DC, so I'm taking this all personally," I said. "Those streets I walked down, people getting beaten to the ground and taken away. The homeless." 

 

"Oh my god, the homeless," he said. "How can you not care about another person?" The bulldozers destroying their few belongings. His ex is homeless, lives on a beach in a tent now. Venmos him for $40 a shot, "for leaving her." Had to call the cops on her the other night. Hasn't seen their daughter in three years. "She was abused by family," he says. "The rest of them are ok, but she's a total f-king mess." It's been six years of this.

 

I say, "pedophilia." "OMG, they always project," he says, "but at first I didn't believe it, until I saw the names of all those Republicans. Mike Johnson and his son, all those guys." I tell him that subject is personal to me, too.

 

J holds out his cell phone at about waist height and starts pretending to text his daughter about the sexual act he's engaged in, which I will not repeat here. "Can you believe?!!" He keeps fake texting for a while, righteously angry at what he's imitating.

 

Homan and Stephen Miller: "their heads look like f-king penises!" I suggested that Miller resembles Goebbels. J is very up on things, but he didn't know about Goebbels." He holds up his phone and in a quasi-German accent says, "Gooobels." Up pops JG on the screen, lots and lots of photographs of him. "See, he's Stephen Miller with hair." "All his hair! F-king Nazi! They would have loved each other!" J is now vaping from a dark red device, blowing smoke between us.

 

J turned to go, holding out his fist for a bump. "You're bleeding, J," I tell him. "I'm always bleeding," he says, and strides across the street.

 

Green cones

 

The other morning, S. was arranging traffic cones, as usual, near the cemetery entrance. But they were green! "What happened to the orange cones?" I asked. "I like to take pictures of them." "Oh, the boss says no one likes orange cones, so he's gotten new ones."

 

This morning, I remarked on the felled trees, little knowing that I would soon see another whole line of stumps up the hill. "Well, when the boss arrived, I told him that some of the local guys who work here would help him get acclimated to the place. But he said he was too busy. Too busy. Said he needed to change as much as possible in the first 90 days. It's all about changing things."

 

Sounds like someone at the top, I remarked. "Oh, we wish he were as good as Trump," S responded. "And you know what? He HATES Trump."

 

"Sure acts like him."

From Startles

 I was corresponding with a fellow poet recently about how difficult it is to write now (right now); there are so many pressures from the outside, that the inside feels suffocated. So I'm now writing about that feeling, though it doesn't go anywhere toward solving the real problems: Gaza, ICE, the death of the social safety net, a paucity of empathy in society. You name it. So here's today's prose poetic meditation. Not that genre seems of interest either any more.

Yesterday evening, I talked to a neighbor who was trimming a large bush, one that had already been hacked at by maintenance. A few days ago, I saw another neighbor weeding the space between curb and parking lot near his house. It occurs to me that gardening, while always a bit prone to the authoritarian trim and pulling of "weeds," might be seen now as another symptom of our shared helplessness, our looking for something we can control. I was told that the bush was a "safety issue," as you can't see around it to the other part of the parking lot. Maybe slow down in your car? 

 

3 August 2025

Marcel wept over lost photographs as if they were the places they ghosted with their flat presences. A photo can be a memory disowned, stilled to an instant that no longer moves. But to disown a memory is not to forget. I misplaced the photograph of my father that sat unframed on a ledge beside my mother’s bed at Arden Courts. It was the photograph that was crumpled, not my father beside a canal amid orange and red leaves of an autumn.

There’s the photograph of my parents in front of a large rock in their back yard. The last I have of my father. The glass to a cheap frame is broken, but that has nothing to do with time, rather with the fragility of glass. My father is not broken, but he’s gone. The space of thirty years is a dirt path next to the water that autumn.

During, enduring, time’s passage measured by the gap between me and the photograph on the shelf, the wall, material kissing material, albeit with a nail’s assistance. An artificial stillness ensues, as if the photograph will last. A real sweetness, this melancholy. Then the photographs of bodies, their teeth, their bloody shirts, their mangled limbs, as if a corpse were merely proof of their having been, then when time meant something to them.

And us. We’re not happy with our art, are we, when it requires a trade wind’s occasional showers. No tariffs on that trade, no anger in the palms, no disappearance of light. What does it mean to make art when there is no time, no space, only a tunnel under Gaza ruins where someone digs his own grave, or so we’re told, not able to trust a voice we cannot hear? The bulldozers come for us, too.

It’s not our bodies they consume, but our beautiful sentences, the ones we want to have written, want to be writing, want having been written, the verbs we can’t find in mind’s crushed concrete. To make metaphors of genocide to fulfill the need for art is nearly as vile as the photographs themselves. But we take from what we see to make what we intend to be; when being’s crushed, what’s left? The new boss at the cemetery’s taking down trees, razing patches of bamboo; they call him Chainsaw Mike. Our neighbor cuts a large bush to smithereens to make it symmetrical with another, previously hacked.

Symmetry’s a forced art, farce inside the chaos. Perhaps you can use some software to focus the chaos into clarity. A fascist architecture admits no variation on the mean. The new boss has his men cut the trees for fun, perhaps. What the paperbark has seen it folds into itself, like the shadow of a leaf or the ribbon that marks it for extinction.

 

Tie a Yellow Ribbon

 

"They're going to cut down one of my favorite trees for a water feature," I said to S at the cemetery guard shack. "Oh, it's chainsaw Mike again," he responded. "You should see the Temple grounds. Wrecked."

 

Since I had him in my sights, I asked S where he stood on the Epstein thing. He's my go-to guy for conspiracy theories, you see. "Well, that wasn't his body. That was Tony Rodham's body, the brother of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Just look at the photos."

 

"What bothers me are all the victims," I said. "Yeah, well something's going on. A Republican speaks out, gets called in and suddenly changes his mind. It's not one party. I'd say 80% of them are crooked." 

 

I told him I'd written to the boss about the tree. But he gave me no reason to feel hopeful. Chainsaw Mike is in charge, after all.