Category Archives: The Liminal Times

Driving Through Michigan in October

http://nghomes.com/plugins/ Driving Through Michigan in October

The highway hummed beneath me
and I’m thinking about the years
stacked like worn photographs in a shoebox.

How they blur together until one afternoon
becomes every afternoon,
one goodbye every farewell.

There’s a town I passed through once
where the leaves were turning
and someone I loved was still alive.

Now I’m older and the songs on the radio
sound like they’re playing underwater.

Then fields stretch out brown and gold.
Everything is beautiful and everything is passing.

A plane crossed the sky and I wondered
where it was going, who was on it,
if they were looking down at me
the way I was looking up at them,
both of us in motion,
both of us trying to get somewhere,
both of us already gone.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The Vine


Gonayiv The Vine

Love is the mind’s way of creating nature.
Falling in it is the mind’s way of creating eternity.

I step into the yard at dawn.
Dew on my shoes.
Dogs sniffing the ground
because they know the score.

A crow on the roof
screams its claim on the day.

The fig vine climbs the fence
because that is what it does.

I stand there
feeling the world push back.
Not hard.
Just true.

Love shows up the same way.
A thought that becomes a vine
and then keeps growing.

And when you fall into it,
you fall clean.
Time opens.
You follow.

Citysurf by Vivian Maier


From the nineteen-fifties until a few years before she died destitute in 2009, Vivian Maier took at least 150,000 pictures, mostly in Chicago, and showed them to nobody.

For decades, she supported herself as a nanny in the wealthy enclaves of the city. But her real work was roaming the streets with her camera (often with her young charges in tow), capturing images of sublime spontaneity, wit, and compositional savvy.

Maier’s covert work might have languished in obscurity if not for the chance acquisition, in 2007, of a cache of negatives, prints, contact sheets, and unprocessed rolls of film, all seized from a storage locker because she fell behind on the rent.

When John Maloof, a Chicago real-estate agent, bought the material, everything about Maier’s identity was a mystery except for her name. It was only when he ran across her death notice, two years later, that her story began to unfold.

Now Maier has earned her place alongside Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Lisette Model, Garry Winogrand, as a as a giant of American street photography.