around/about

From Adrienne Rich's new essay collection, A Human Eye:

A poem is not about; it is out of and to. Passionate language in movement. The deep structure is always musical, and physical--as breath, as pulse.

This strikes me as I travel in the southwest. Out here I'm removed from the routine and I see differently. I see because the elevation is 6,000 feet, because the predominant hue isn't green but mesa red and sage brush gray. I see differently because the architecture is pueblo not colonial. Here the color turquoise is myth not decoration. My breath is short as I run. The sun does in fact beat against my skin. There are new cadences -- the grandmother's voice lifts up at the end of her instructions to her grandson. I get stuck in my landscape, the small backyard of my mind. It feels good to be in motion.

Rich again:

Poetic imagination or intuition is never merely unto itself, free-floating, or self-enclosed. It's radical, meaning root-tangled in the grit of human arrangements and relationships: how we are with each other.

Here are some things I saw over the past couple of days