Except as noted, all images copyrighted by and should be attributed to E B Hawley.
I had become many eons ago a traveling literary gnome, inquisitive about places I had and had not visited,
walking the same paths of peoples from the past, through places once grand and still grand,
photographing images that now show me the places about which I still dream . . .

Friday, July 5, 2013

Circus Woman, My Sister


    She sat cross-legged on the bench, her jaws tensed, her eyes narrowed, as if she barely tolerated her circumstances, the people around her. Occasionally she glanced at a child jumping in the bouncer, then at the other people in the county fair.  Popcorn was sold, along with sugar candy, and parents bought that stuff for their unsuspecting children, who, in their naiveté, gorged. That's what she saw, I think, or her thoughts took her eyes elsewhere.
    I watched her with pain: Listen to the expression, "There go I but for the grace of God," uttered by your voice. I deduced that she traveled with the circus that had just come to town, and that she lived in a trailer, closed quarters and modestly, and that in between her hard work and long days she had no time to visit the museums or art galleries or culture of all the places to which her circus travelled, and that something else, abuse of any kind, in her life, made her feel bitter, understandably, and thus she held her lips tight, and her eyes narrowed to the world. She is my sister.
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Let Lovely Turn of Phrase Begin

JMHawley Gave Me a Kiss to Build a Dream On

Listen, will you? I think that . . . literature, poetry, music and love make the world go round . . . while mathematics explains things; I fill my life with them, then go walking in snowy woods.
Let us go then, you and I
like two etherized patients floating
through life, together feeling prufrockian.
DDB Jr. makes my world go 'round; during his absence, Pachelbel fills it up.
One summer I sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, then through the Gulf of Finland to reach Saint Petersburg; I pursued Joseph Brodsky in its alley ways. I dream of making that two summers.
I read “Biking to Electra;” found my way in a Jaguar car, and glanced at the flashing steel grasshoppers at sunset. I’ll follow K.O.P.’s footsteps after he followed N.Scott Momaday’s; find warmth and inspiration on a rainy mountain.
Throw chinese coins for the I Ching.
Save the whales, the spotted owl, the woman in toil.
Cast a fly for trout; my memories of fly fishing under the sunny blue Colorado sky remain; I yearn to build more . . . with more trophy Browns.
Listen for the swan’s calls on the Baltic Sea. Feel KKII's joy, his arms spread wide in Yazilikaya.
Good night, Jimmy Durante, where ever you are.