Maybe Next Time

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;   
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools…
   From ‘IF’ by Rudyard Kipling

 

Happy Family

 I took this family portrait as part of a wedding shoot in  the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in the shadow of Mt. St. Helens in 2008 .The family has a 150 acre parcel that was purchased before the national forest designation. So it is literally  well inside  the park..they being the only  human  inhabitants for many many miles. The cabin is the original homestead.

 

Equus

 

Heat

by Jane Hirshfield

My mare, when she was in heat,
would travel the fenceline for hours,
wearing the impatience
in her feet into the ground.

 

Not a stallion for miles, I’d assure her,
give it up.

 

She’d widen her nostrils,
sieve the wind for news, be moving again,
her underbelly darkening with sweat,
then stop at the gate a moment, wait
to see what I might do.
Oh, I knew
how it was for her, easily
recognized myself in that wide lust:
came to stand in the pasture
just to see it played.
Offered a hand, a bucket of grain—
a minute’s distraction from passion
the most I gave.

 

Then she’d return to what burned her:
the fence, the fence,
so hoping I might see, might let her free.
I’d envy her then,
to be so restlessly sure
of heat, and need, and what it takes
to feed the wanting that we are—

 

only a gap to open
the width of a mare,
the rest would take care of itself.
Surely, surely I knew that,
who had the power of bucket
and bridle—
she would beseech me, sidle up,
be gone, as life is short.
But desire, desire is long.