Tuesday, April 17, 2012

small things that happen when no one is here to know



rain thrums through broken boards






once a crow flew in through an empty windowframe
then back out







sunlight breathes on the ruined walls
like his memory of her voice in the mornings








daigle homestead, built circa 1870
blind river, ontario

10 comments:

  1. "sunlight breathes on the ruined walls
    like his memory of her voice in the mornings"

    really like the imagery in your words and photos

    ReplyDelete
  2. whenever rain falls I try to listen me out a name being drummed by the drops. bit haunting pictures, yet wonderful to dream.

    please have a good wednesday ahead.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I'm sure the wood has a smell of mold from all the years of rain. I can hear his footsteps on those hollow floors.

    This place probably has seen many crows fly in and out of it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Susan: thank you. i am always happy when you visit :-)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Robert: i think everything is there in the rain, if we listen, every name, every story we have not heard yet. i listen, too. i hope you have a wonderful week!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Liz: i have developed a taste for abandoned houses and the reveries they provoke, just by standing in rooms and wondering who else might have stood here, what their lives were. no doubt this will end either with my falling though a rotten floor and breaking my neck, or getting arrested for trespassing -- but until then...

    ReplyDelete
  7. these are haunting images - as only memories can be, indeed. but then, there is also the explosion of light, and the possibility of letting all past (and oneself, completely) be blown away in it... not only the possibility, but the longing for this, too

    ReplyDelete
  8. it's incredibly humbling to stand in someone's homestead. it is an experience that is indescribable, really. there is a convergence of the physical and spiritual realms, it seems, time moving slowly and pneumatically through the old boards and windows. (perhaps this is why they let go?) it causes one to think about one's own brief time and what imprint we make, which echoes we leave. how much of a sliver we are as we stand there! it reminds me both of the time i stood in that nomadic village in Thailand and those who lived there stood behind trees watching me (who was i to be there?) and it reminds me of every homecoming as well, as though we most definitely belong within those decaying walls.

    your photographs open inside of me the truth of many perspectives inside of any one home, any one experience. they shocked me, at first, as i have been going to this home for seven years or so. they rattled my false notion that somehow i had a piece of ownership there. i am grateful for such rattlings. i say, please, again and again.

    xo
    erin

    ReplyDelete
  9. Roxana: yes, longing ...

    there is a part of me, an important part, that would stand in one of these rooms, before the window, and be eaten away by the light, quickly and ecstatically, to erasure ...

    ReplyDelete
  10. erin: thank you for being grateful. it seemed to me, too, that you had some ownership here, and i could offer these images only with some hesitation ...

    we pass through houses, just as we pass through the rest of the world ... we come and go through the walls, and neither we nor they are permanent, we simply fade at different rates ...

    ReplyDelete