This month, I’m writing words and posting images relating to the landscape of memory. I hope to write poems most days and also share photos, quotes, and more prosaic thoughts related in some way to memory, nostalgia, longing for place, remembering and forgetting, landscape, dreamscape, landscape’s memory and memory’s landscape, the intersection of the layered historical physical world with personal memory, the frames that both landscape and memory use to contain and order our focus, the landscape of childhood, the landscape of devastation, how memories lie and tell the truth, the fragmentation of memory, how landscapes shape us and our memories, and so on. All the posts will be linked to the Introductory Page as they are posted. Thanks for visiting.

Today, a piece of Charles Wright’s poem “Back Yard Boogie Woogie,” apt for Valentine’s Day (my heart’s beating, after all), and some photos of my back yard on this mid-February day: blue skies, sun, and 11 degrees Fahrenheit at 1 p.m., “feels like -6.”

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I try to look at landscape as though I weren’t there,

but know, wherever I am,

I disturb that place by breathing, by my heart’s beating—
I only remember things that I think I’ve forgot,
Lives the color of dead leaves, for instance, days like dead insects.

Most of my life is like that,

scattered, fallen, overlooked.

 

— Charles Wright, from “Back Yard Boogie Woogie,” Appalachia (1998)

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So much is scattered, fallen, overlooked.