First day of Summer: 2006

Originally uploaded by Jaci Sue

"There is a book inside us, written by the finger of God, through which we may read all things."

-Jean Baptiste van Helmont

Maria Stein, Ohio

Plaster deer with Stations of the Cross.

Shrine of the Holy Relics- Maria Stein, Ohio

And it poured out like springtime-

like breathing in a storm cloud.

In the lost pages of childhood

and here in the twilight of who I used to be

images hold my hand and heart still.

It is a mirror held up and dropped again;

it is the road spooling out behind;

it is a river writen on the palm of my hand;

it has broken my heart

wide open.

The steps outside Cearsars Palace- Las Vegas, NV 

July 2008

(for some reason when I think of Las Vegas I remember everything as being pink.)

the geography of youth

I have studied the geography of  youth; mapped my regret and rapture in the trees and roads of Miami County. I have found causal links in cracked sidewalks; patterns like the lines in my hand, criss-crossed in railroad ties; photographs never taken in fields with lonely trees. The music of what was once said was put on mixtapes and forgotten in a moment; the names unspoken, the faces unremembered.

We were led to believe in the process of memory, in the significance of past tense formation of character, in the finalization of landscape.

I have locked a secret word in my heart, and lost, the key will not be used. I have found the mythical names of remembering and from them constructed others. Born and becoming: I have whispered the word into man, taken my dream of nighttime drives, moved out and into, and fallen back on the promises of youth.

In the past few years I've heard several people lament the loss of the night sky for most of the world's population, and I'm right there with them, lamenting too.  What will perpetual twilight at night do to our dreams; to our selves?

There is a stillness that comes in darkness. The stillness of being small and quiet and anonymous in the night, especially during a night spent in the wilderness; smaller than the universe, just as small as the other animals invisible around you.

But there is stillness to be found in a city even yet, with perpetual twilight looming. There are moments of forgetting one's self even in the sodium glow of streetlights; of being still and small in the universe.