Stone #9

...it was a dawn of phosphorescent algae, coming in from the ocean, drifting overland,


a green sun
hung in icicles.

_

[I wrote the image early morning, and late at night, during a frigid -16C wind chill dog walk, took this photo with my iPhone - it's photoshopped, and I'll show the original in another post- but how strange... is floating green phosphorescence a presence... in my images, and photos...? I do like how the photo turned out but couldn't tell you what I did to create it in the shades you see here.]

A River
of Stones

                                          

Stone #8

like white fruit drifting from the sky, like a swirl of cold blossoms that hide patches of hardened blackberry ice

_
[some of the crystals of snow falling were huge, clumped together, like chunks of coconut, reminding me of falling white fruit, and the second image of a swirl of cold blossoms should have come first, blossoms before fruit, but that's not how the image composed itself and I had no energy to resist with insistence on some modicum of poetic logic - but I had already fallen in love with the image 'blackberry snow' -no idea where it came from- how freshly falling billowy snow tastes to my synaesthetic seeing... later in the day I was able to re-assert some poetic order to the image and called it properly 'blackberry ice' referring to the black ice on which we can slip, skid, fall, tumble...

the image sounds like a fancy fruity cocktail? I wish...]

A River
of Stones

                                          

Stone #7

A bath lit by flame. Candles whisper at the edges of the water. And a singer whose song arises from the caves of the earth rising up through the steam.

_
[A host of candles. Tealights placed around the edge of the bath. Lisa Gerrard's The Silver Tree (scroll down to find it).]

A River
of Stones

                                          

Sole Readers

What histories are written in the feet? Who can read the lines? Steps through the years. The earth presses against our feet. Ancient bone runes, graveyards rising, shoes fill with dirt, with seeds that unfurl cartographies inscribed in swirls of lines, ridges and hollows that map life in calloused, toughened skin.

These animal pads.

Their
finely boned dance.

____



If you click on any image it'll take you to the album, and a larger slideshow if you so wish.

Into the bathroom I went with a large pad of paper, dark acrylic paint, a cleaned shrimp sauce container from Christmas day for water, a large brush and shouted to my daughter, 'I'm taking off my jeans, don't be embarrassed!' I laid an old dog towel and paper towels on the floor, poured some water into the tub with bubble bath creating a pool of a few inches of warm water.

I painted the soles of my feet, and stood, stomped, painted some more, took specimens, footprints, identifying etchings. The bottom of my feet were dark sepia black.

Then I scrubbed my soles clean with a sponge in the bath, watched the grey water swirl down the drain.

After I used a daylight bulb and took these photos. For the visceral, the real. Animal pads, baby!

Feet that done a bunch of walkin' through a whole crunch of years, oh yeah!

___
Written for Big Tent Poetry prompt: feet.