Taking A Break . . .

Great Blue Heron at Innisfree Garden

Starting tomorrow, I'll be offline for a couple weeks or so.  I've enabled comment moderation, but I'll make sure any comments Prufrock's might be lucky enough to receive are posted once I'm back online.

Gathering Blossoms While I May

Central Park Conservatory Garden
(if you can't see the photo slideshow above, try clicking here.)

Traveling Music



(No, not a misprint:  the musical form is a palindrome, and the title is a palindrome, as well.)

So, off I go to the Vale of Glamorgan Festival of Music.  I'll look forward to catching up with you on my return from Wales.

Gather Ye Blossoms While Ye May (Part Two)

Central Park Conservatory Garden

The sun returned, and we went in search of blossoms once again.

Gather Ye Blossoms While Ye May (Part One)

Japanese Garden, Brooklyn Botanic Garden

The calendar turned to April, and we went in search of blossoms.

Crabapple

Some Days, Everything Is A Picture

Photography is always a subjective way to see the world, it is an art—you think about your composition, you omit, you choose a special detail, a segment or angle—in short:  you create.

—Brigitta Hügel

Ah, fine photographers.  They understand their equipment; they have patience and skill; they have the eye to spot the perfect shot.  My appreciation for them grows every time I venture forth with my camera.

City Sojourn

Grand Central Station at night

Fall, Interrupted

In October, we like to look out at the hills and watch the color coming on.

Innisfree in October

In autumn, Innisfree Garden, so lush with blooms in spring and summer, begins to reveal its bones.  The stands of yellow flag have been cut down, the bed from which peonies once spilled out has been returned to bare ground.

Maine's Great Clepsydra

“Clepsydra” is really a meditation on how time feels as it is passing.

—John Ashbery

John Ashbery’s poem, Clepsydra, begins with the phrase “Hasn’t the sky?”  The question, opening out to anywhere, lured me into the poem.

Hasn’t the sky?  Returned from moving the other
Authority recently dropped, wrested as much of
That severe sunshine as you need now on the way
You go. . . .

Clepsydra is the Greek word for water clock.  John Steinbeck used it also, to describe the action of the tides:  "Time is more complex near the sea than in any other place, for in addition to the circling of the sun and the turning of the seasons, the waves beat out the passage of time on the rocks and the tides rise and fall as a great clepsydra."

High Noon with a Great Blue Heron

Dateline Thursday, July 14, 2011, 12PM.

Just back from the Adirondacks, I set out for Innisfree Garden with my camera, too-short telephoto zoom lens, and binoculars, a bottle of water, floppy hat, and all-important three-legged folding stool ready to be stashed in the pockets of my photog vest.  I figured, with my luck of late, the camera would stay slung over my shoulder and the stool stashed, but I consoled myself that Innisfree is always a nice place for a walk.

Searching for Birds in the Adirondacks

—for Jan & Ann

While at magnificent Elk Lake in the Adirondacks this year, I had cause to think of John, that consummate birder, over at Hedgeland Tales.  I was thinking particularly of a post about butterflies he’d written when “birds were scarce” at Nene Washes (which looks to be a wonderful nature reserve in Cambridgeshire, England).

Still Kids

This past Easter, George Wallace, in his own inimitable commemoration of Easter Sunday, tweeted out a video of Patti Smith singing her song Easter.  He ended his tweet, as I remember it, with the cheer, “Go Rimbaud.”