Sometimes as a photographer I become preoccupied with color, sometimes with repeated themes or objects, sometimes with form or line. Recently, in looking over past work, I was pulled toward images with strong triangular lines.
Then, while looking at my poetry from the past three decades, I found the mysterious poem I wrote about twenty years ago. The catalyst was a dream, quiet on the surface but overlaying weird unspoken and imaginary anxieties, held together with the image of the surveyor or navigator who depend upon triangulation to achieve results…another set references for the concept of ‘triangle’.
Triangles: glyphs of both stability and of instability.
I hope you enjoy these poetic and photographic evocations of this fundamental form!
Triangle
It’s on my mind, you say, as though
your mind were as flat as a table, with one
Platonic Idea riding above its polished surface
like a sleek craft bound for glory.
What’s on your mind?, you ask, casual,
thumbing a magazine while you unleash
a hurricane into our lives. My mind goes dark
momentarily. I am swept somewhere unfamiliar,
south of Bermuda, perhaps. Our compass
has a new point of reference,
another magnetic pull. We are three
dimensions but I can’t tell what
is up. This weird, unfathomable
triangulation of desire
spins me in tight circles of fear.
Call me when the coast
is clear.
Leslie Schultz
