Dig
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AG2026_1120705a or live our myth in the recurrence
Lee Friedlander, Life Still. (Aperture)
Six Photographers on Lee Friedlander’s Timeless Influence.
No one really dies in the myths.
No world is lost in the stories.
Everything is lost in the retelling,
in being wondered at. We grow up
and grow old in our land of grass
and blood moons, births and goneness.
We live our myth in the recurrence,
pretending we will return another day.
Like the morning coming every morning.
The truth is we come back as a choir.
Otherwise Eurydice would be forever
in the dark. Our singing brings her
back. Our dying keeps her alive.The Singers Change, the Music Goes On, Linda Gregg
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AG2026_1120538a or in their brevity to reach one another
What things are steadfast? Not the birds.
Not the bride and groom who hurry
in their brevity to reach one another.
The stars do not blow away as we do.
The heavenly things ignite and freeze.
But not as my hair falls before you.
Fragile and momentary, we continue.
Fearing madness in all things huge
and their requiring. Managing as thin light
on water. Managing only greetings
and farewells. We love a little, as the mice
huddle, as the goat leans against my hand.
As the lovers quickening, riding time.
Making safety in the moment. This touching
home goes far. This fishing in the air.We Manage Most When We Manage Small, Linda Gregg
What am I if not what happens
when I try to run away?Water falls out of me like
an opinion. I’m like a screen
door banging between two rivers.Dear air, what’s inside me
you’re so desperate to take?I put on the Atlantic like a sweater.
My head bobs on the surface
of a lake I’m named after.Where do I belong?
My head asks. My body,
exasperated, answers.Ode on Humidity, P. Scott Cunningham (Poetry, April 2026)
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Melvin Edwards
Tomorrow’s Wind, 1991. Public Art Fund — Doris C. Freedman Plaza, February 17 – May 31, 1991.
Thomas Jefferson Park. Materialism.nyc.
2007 via flickr
Before Words,” 1990. Public Art Fund — Brighter Days at DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, June 1, 2022 – April 30, 2023.
Public Art Fund at City Hall Park, New York City, May 4 to November 28, 2021.
Photo: Nicholas Knight, Courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY.
Melvin Edwards, Ausstellungsansicht Kunsthalle Bern, 2025. Foto: Cedric Mussano -
A lane of Yellow led the eye
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A lane of Yellow led the eye
Unto a Purple Wood
Whose soft inhabitants to be
Surpasses solitude
If Bird the silence contradict
Or flower presume to show
In that low summer of the West
Impossible to know -
Emily Dickinson -
dexterous and fugitive
AG2024_1520824
Through the young and awkward hours
my lady perfectly moving,
through the new world scarce astir
my fragile lady wandering
in whose perishable poise
is the mystery of Spring
(with her beauty more than snow
dexterous and fugitive
my very frail lady drifting
distinctly, moving like a myth
in the uncertain morning, with
April feet like sudden flowersFrom “Puella Mea” [Through the young and awkward hours], E. E. Cummings
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where pleasure and beauty and hours fit into a life
AG2017-DCG-DCLU_1110148a
‘… where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, […], who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”
“Even as ornament, flowers represent life itself, as fertility, mortality, transience, extravagance, and as such they enter our art, rites, and language.” – Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses.
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that hue that overtakes
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In Poland, the land takes over everything,
unrelenting in its mission to regenerate
after the war. Fields overrun sidewalks,
train stations, street corners. Purple
flowers spill from the open windows of houses.
Queen Anne’s lace reigns supreme in parking
lots. Even the dead in cemeteries are affected:
no neatly trimmed grass here but waves upon
waves of wild flowers. Blue lupine, saffron,
black-eyed Susan, chicory. The dead love
this wildness growing above their bones.
“Tak, tak,” they whisper in the hush of the wind
that scatters the soft gossamer of dandelions
into the waiting air. “Yes, yes, take over this place
that was once lost. Cover it in so much color
even the clouds, who’ve seen everything,
won’t know where death lived for so long.”And who can argue with the dead? Not their
thin ghosts or unborn progeny. Not their
exile who returns after the war, stands
bewildered at their graves, hip-deep
in blue-eyed grass, trying to decipher names
that already belong to the earth.After the War: Purple Flowers Spilling from the Windows, Linda Nemec Foster
after William Carlos Williams’s “Queen-Anne’s-Lace”
Remote purple lays claim to stem,
beside routine stripes of green and brown.
Dark as a patch of shade
in the marsh across the path
that the neighborhood kids and I,
were forbidden to pass. It is
that hue that overtakes,
the marsh that sucks in boots
and offers up skunk cabbage and cattails.
Nests here and overhead. Who named this plant—
also called bog onion, brown dragon, Indian turnip, wake robin,
Arisaema triphyllum—
and who told me I cannot name. But
his purple—all shadow, all remote and not-remote,
all question marks,
craving. Yes?
This herbaceous perennial, growing from corm
vertical and swollen as it is underground.
Even in late summer, it is not nothing, William
(or Jack),
turning from purple to red before his scattering.Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Kimiko Hahn
as in purpose; the purple of the hillside
enrolled me in its misery, mysterious mist
emanating.When it was over the daydescended in the form of a star, ours,
which is to say the dark returnedwhich is to say a measure of darkness inter
posed between and among the sources
the lights twinkling against a moon.This was a landscape longed for, lost.
Long as a verb—to increase in length
of days, of nights, of neither.Still the purple stain, floral embellishment,
ingrains itself, inhabits banished gardens.Another End, Bin Ramke