To the nascent naturalist
On craggy coast and yeasty shore
Philosophers have walked the lonely walk before
The deadliest view of the living sound
Primeval slush to the horizon unbound.
Two decades old, no need for a stroller
No need to grow two decades older
The ice plant sucks salt from the rock
The surf, the gulls — a ticking clock.
To the nascent naturalist
She speaks in tongues
With a breath of mystery
She fills his lungs
He coughs up questions and answers.
Salty absurdity as his hammer
To the rock he pins a foundation of lectures
Till he’s built around him four broad walls
A sturdy home of queries, conjectures
With a weary sigh he surveys his tribute
Relishing proudly its perfected angles
Four broad walls and not a window to breathe through
The vine whose roots the branches strangle.
In convoluted sentential tangles
He digs and prays for profound detection
But mystery remains at sea:
“Goodbye, perverted reflection.”
the overwhelming fullness of being
lately, as temperatures in san francisco have been so perfect as to cause one to forget temperature exists at all, i’ve been suffering from an inability to totally comprehend the beauty around me. i work on the twelfth floor in a high-rise that stands on the peak of parnassus heights; the floor-to-ceiling windows of our howard hughes-funded research facility look out over golden gate park, ocean beach, and mt. tamalpais. standing behind that tempered glass i can’t even absorb the splendor, but rather stand unfulfilled, analyzing and not experiencing the profundity of what i’m seeing. i want to merge myself with the view; and i wonder if a life not spent learning to do this is a bit wasted.
sometimes i want to capture it with a photograph, but the photograph presents exactly the problem: with it i can capture the image, not necessarily the experience. a photo of a person can capture the experience of the subject, but how do you capture the experience of the photographer, as the strokes of the brush capture that of the painter? here i tried to use angles and exposure to represent the experience of being overwhelmed and unable to capture the fullness of the scene:
