Orange Boots for the Llama

This is half of one of my mother's slides that probably should have been discarded:

1) After developing, when it was seen to be a double exposure

2) When I went through our family slides after my mother died and discarded hundreds of them, mostly of trips and conferences where I could not identify any of the people.

3) Just before I spent a quarter to send this slide to India with many of its companions

to be scanned by Scancafe, from whence the careful workers send 

the files back with every picture right side up!

Still, I am very glad it survived, and I have it:

1) because of the faint and beautiful children's faces in the lower left.

2) Because of the individualized expressions on the faces of the llamas.

3) because of the elegant and beautiful decorations on their sides.

4) because I did not know llamas were capable of such hauteur.

5) because the second exposure has gifted the right-side llama with bright-orange boots.

Tonight's poem is from a poet I recently discovered, although he has actually been around quite a while.

Hubcaps

The tractor runs over dirt and shapes it, turning
stubble and moving the hill
furrow by furrow to the terraces,
slicing clods, wearing
them away and chopping roots
to rot in sweet beds of decay.

The owl, eyes like arenas
gathering
the weeds and hungry ditches.
She guards the air like a monument
shedding a field of energy downwind.

Old hubcaps burning all night in the creek.

Robert Morgan

Red Owl, W. W. Norton, 1972, page 73.

Poem recipe or task: Write a poem in a dozen lines. The first stanza describes something common in your environment in a clear, original and forceful manner. Try to use strong, simple-sounding words like roots, stubble, clods and weeds. The second, not quite as long, describes an animal or bird doing what it would naturally do nearby the activity in the first stanza. End with a single line in which something perfectly ordinary (and not out of place in this environment) becomes mysterious and surprising.

And remember my reminder: IT'S ALL ART, ALL THE TIME!