Barbara Woodmansee
Sweetwater RhythmThoughts and images
Just before night has totally given way, the air is thick and heavy, my camera useless in the fog. The business of last night is evident – wandering ropes of slender trails through the blades, leaving only suggestions of who went there.
Black swallowtail basks frozen on a cypress branch, wings splayed, waiting for the sun to rise and send it into the sky. The only motion in all the view is horse tails, swaying as the dark herd grazes in the wet. Their youngest rolls, puppy-like in the grass, hooves in the air, eyes closed, silently laughing.
I walk the grass on the edge of the crushed rock to maintain the silence I’ve entered, letting sound introduce me to who calls from the marsh unseen. A limpkin wails in the distance, its contagious cry swelling up from every direction as others answer.
As I step onto the boardwalk, a limpkin preens dappled brown and white feathers, her doe’s eyes watch me approach and pass her by. I move through the wild canna, now taller than I am, looking for a flash of violet and blue. Purple gallinules walk a tightrope of slender stalks, giant yellow toes grasping many branches, seeking the seeds and flowers at the ends. A tiny bittern, the last fuzz of babyhood on its crown, is frozen on a pickerel weed stalk, brilliant yellow eye following me.
The slender cool melts and the sun takes the morning, my vision blurring as sweat runs into my eyes. In the sticky burn of summer, I dream of days wrapped in my coat, fingers on my camera numb in the cold. Ducks on the water in the short days, my arms exhausted from lifting my heavy lens… impossible to imagine deep in the resonant cloak of humid heat. I think the same thoughts backwards in January.
I hope for a snail kite today, to hang above me in perfect light. Or the pink-billed whistling ducks, banking as they swirl in circles, always calling. I’m waiting for a picture, watching for treasure, capturing a moment.
Barbara Woodmansee 