Elan Mudrow
Smidgens
Looking Glass
Little Crater Lake, July 2018
A double blue reflection. The cobalt of the lake with its graveyard of dead trees lying on the bottom. One recent death half-floats in purgatory. And the deep blue of the sky, foregrounded by a living green forest. Both blues framed by ancient volcanic formations. All is alive, even death.
More photos here.
Event Horizon
We bluff the light, together, loving within the slow pull of measurable movement
Creating fragile horizons out of uncertain wavelengths
Nestling
Fragile nest
In the midst of
Erratic blaze
Sand Fire
Where the Columbia River meets the Pacific Ocean
Clatsop Spit, Oregon, August 2018
Carbon
We watch the night sky, safe under its lights, reading a language of the night. Our hands fumble, circle as if in orbit, landing inside each other’s magnetic field.
We whisper to one another in a planet’s dialect, built by a syntax of suns, stanzas that play between solar winds and the ultraviolet, poetry of passion and reaction.
And upon summers like this one, many readers like us have lain and will lie in the quiet, underling quotes of hot stars in a sticky cluster, a mingling of gravity and motion.
Even at this remote position, far out on a limb of a galaxy, we know the shape of light, its means of flicker.
We accept that light is a fallible hydrogen, a spinning of stories, fiction, changing faster than longing, where denouements appear daily and relationships serve as catharsis.
Our simple act is a holding of hands, a close reading of one another, which may last for a second or for an entire space time continuum.
Our bodies move closer, clumsy, as if forever threatens to do away with us. We touch before daylight strips away our nakedness.
That’s when I let you kiss me.
I laugh with the universe in my lips.
Romancing The Drought
The mountain, hip bone of earth, shoots down a dry, hot wind
Rattles the skeleton city, held together by a series of pins and plastic cartilage.
We hang refrigerators, like art, In our bedroom windows
Who rattle clumsy tunes, instrumentals, transposing the fever of a ragged daze.
Between sheets of sea, in our urchin shells, we carve coolness into the shape of ocean waves
And sleep with mountain ranges wrapped around each other.
More photos here.
Dude
Near the Sandy Glacier on Mt. Hood, I met this spiky-haired, hip hop hippy. I liked his medallion. He was chill, happy, didn’t say much.
Birdlike — Elan Mudrow Photography
They were birdlike and referred to their planet as the nest.
(Timothy Lake, Oregon, July 2018)
Frankenstein
We think the river a wild beast, amok, tilling a path in soil.
But it’s us—in another form, searching for a mate who can only be made in our own image.
We slow the stream, to a reservoir’s pulse, in hope to drink reflections—until the end of our days.
Yet, days are a slight of hand, manmade lakes, built, so we can sing to the photogenic current.
Stilled, captured in a portrait
Touched, retouched, retold
Likeness — Elan Mudrow Photography
Alien Intruder or just the shadow of a nerd?
Burnt Lake, Oregon, September 2017
(The Square Peg)
The L Joint
On the roof of this five-story building is a forest of tar, softening in the summer, seeping rain in the winter. Pigeons roost there. Not in the tar itself, but in little areas where vents pop out above the forest. There is one larger vent, a two feet wide tube, that makes its way straight down to the bottom floor. At the bottom floor there’s an L joint, where the tube zig zags before turning back down, making its final destination, the extinct steam broiler in the basement. That L joint is exposed in a retail shop.
Occasionally, pigeons fall down the vent from the roof, even if the top of the vent is roofed and fenced to stop them from roosting. Pigeons must roost. Since it’s a vertical drop and pigeons can’t fly like helicopters, they get stuck in the L joint. There’s no way to get to them, unless you take apart the pieces of the vent, shaped sheet metal, in sections, painted over in decades of lead paint. This, to the best of my knowledge has never happened. The pigeons scratch with desperate claws for a few days. Then silence.
(Next week, a hole will be cut in the side of the L joint. A little sliding metal door will be fixed to its side. Inside the vent, countless skeletons and feathers of numerous pigeons. Their remains will be placed to rest in respect. Now, when the scratching of claws is heard, I will take a very tall ladder and slide open the little metal door.)
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