Tag: Dublin

The Circle Game

Some might look at this photo and see a single glowing peacock. Pavo cristatus. I can’t speak for the muster of peahens who paused to watch him that August day in Jodhpur, but it’s the countless circles which mesmerized me.

The magician’s swoosh as he vogues, a whisper of downcast bright blue irises. The multi-eyed lifting wave he’s created with closely spaced smaller circles at his display’s bottom layer: a Cupid’s bow being drawn from the straight edge of shadow underneath, or a garden snake? I see the deep greens and blues in which I’ll always feel my missing piece still soaking in the sun.

Now the circles are beckoning me back.

The circle that recently closed for my siblings and me and our families has taken the wind out of me for longer than I would have imagined, deepening winter’s already enduring darkness.

Maybe I’m drawn to the circle’s immortality. Or that’s it’s unbroken. A wedding ring. Gold-dusted green eyes echoed in a child. The planetesque orb formerly known as Pluto.

Offerings in Udaipur. Stars within circles among the wares in Marrakesh. Concentric mosaic circles at St. Mary’s Church in Dublin, Ireland.

Slightly off-center rings around a tree’s perfectly-shaped young core; the algebraic drama of a bright lemon flower’s singular souls. The gentle hills and valleys in bullet glass.

Half of a perfect circle reflected against a hull at sunset. The bumpy segmented layers which peel away to an onion’s solid spherical center. Trees reflecting inside a cylindrical silver tube at high noon.

A sousaphone reflecting rings of past and present. A ship’s wheel’s perfect geometrical symmetry.

Harry Chapin’s All my Life’s a Circle and Joni Mitchell’s The Circle Game were among the first songs my guitar teacher taught me. She leaned far more towards folk than blues. So did I, back then. Before I found John Hiatt and Circle Back. When I had much less to circle back to, and before I fully understood that much circling back is neither smoothly accomplished nor voluntary. Before I realized how easily it can involve degrees of descent into nightmare. The algos of pain more than the nostos of yearning to come home again.

Practically speaking, I can’t turn back time. But lens artists have the power to tame the boundless circles which demarcate our days and nights: the impossibly bright orbs of fire and flares which we gaze directly upon at our peril. For now, we flatten them into gentle white-gold circles coaxing our skies in and out of peacock blue on this side of Paradise.

The Long and Gliding Road

The road most taken in my photographic ouvre is more of a zig-zag over land and sand towards water.

I sink in soggy soil and crunch through panes of glassy frozen water. I watch plovers pause for sunrise and Kingfishers surveying sunset. Gulls gather for the sun’s debut before skimming atop rolling saltwater as they ascend to glide above the retreating waves.

I look up and down by degrees. I rotate, snapping photos in a panoramic arch. I ignore a riot of color on the horizon when I am smitten by an unusual rock or glistening algae underfoot.

I shoot into blinding sunlight and muted mammatus skies. I collect green and every other color. New England snow and molten dunes. Working lobster boats surrounded by vacuum-sealed pleasure craft hoisted from harbors and set aside for the season.

But the subject is always the same: my absent better half.

The departed, poet Robinson Jeffers wrote in “Inscription for a Gravestone,” “have a hand in the sunrises/ And the glow of this grass.“

My lenses and I always chase signs of you, imprinted on both what I and others can see and what only I can see, as you “wander in the air. . . and flow in the ocean” that touches shores I have walked to from home and far more distant places. Where  green is ringed round by green. The Dublin beach from which a seashell of your ashes swirled into surf and feathered gray became liquid blue. 

Sometimes, instead of receiving and recording visible or audible signs from denizens of worlds we–technically–do not share, metaphorical flight proceeds in the other direction. Pablo Neruda both received and dispatched messages over the exceedingly thin space between here and not-here. Alive and alone on shore, in his poem, “If You Forget Me” :

everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.