Triangles, Triangles, Triangles

Posted on May 13, 2014 by Leslie Schultz

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

In Praise of Snow: Photography & Two Poems (“Like Snowflakes” and “Awaken”) by Leslie Schultz

Posted on February 19, 2014 by Leslie Schultz

I am not a rugged, outdoorsy, winter-camping type of person–not by a long shot–but I do find snow very beautiful. When I have lived in climates usually foreign to snow, I found that I longed for it, watched for it to fall.

In each snow-starved place where I’ve lived (the Oregon coast, Australia, Louisiana), I experienced one freakish, exciting, and memorable anomaly of snow-fall. When I lived in Portland, Oregon, schools were closed. Plows were brought down from Mount Hood but unpracticed drivers mounded the snow into the middle of thoroughfares, creating temporary barrier walls and hindering the flow of traffic. In the Blue Mountains of Australia, a family trip during the May school holidays (winter Down Under) found us shivering in thin sleeping bags in an uninsulated cabin, my brother coughing with what I remember as sudden-onset pneumonia, while stinging snowflakes whirled through the branches of the eucalyptus trees. In Louisiana, where I lived for two winters during my graduate school days, a Christmas snowstorm hit while I, like many people in sub-tropical Lake Charles, were away; the plunging temperatures snapped the exposed pipes of most houses in the historic district.

When I moved to Minnesota in the fall of 1985, there was an unseasonably early snow on September 17. I had just come from Louisiana, and I remember shivering in a coat without buttons, going out to purchase a scarf and a pair of red gloves.

Today, a veteran of twenty-nine consecutive winters, I still have a healthy respect for the power of snow to remake–if temporarily–our assumptions about the way our days will proceed. We keep a long-handled broom on the front porch (to push fallen snow off the cars) along with snow shovels, sand, and salt. I think letter carriers deserve hazard pay for being out all day in the cold, but I still thrill to the beauty of the falling snow, the transformations it leaves behind.

And, for me, one reliable side benefit of the season of snow is more time and inclination to write, and never so much so as this year. After decades in which prose held literary sway in my life–either non-fiction for clients or fiction commitments for me–this year, poems are arriving thick and fast. Recently, many have centered on snow and ice.

Here are two poems, the first written yesterday, the second written in 1980 while I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin and published first in Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar: 1982 and in my chapbook, Living Room (Midwestern Writers’ Publishing House, 1981).

Like Snowflakes

A hush, a storm,
a gentle arrival—
poems come in their season,
transform the landscape
of my life—
ah, the dazzle
of that fresh page—white—
with slight patterns—
bird-foot, cat-foot, wind—
and the sculptures
of ink-blue shadows.

Leslie Schultz (2014)

Awaken

to find my house afloat,
pitched on an ocean
of foam-flecked fields.
My breath dissolves a porthole.
The barn is sinking.
Cows break waves with their bellies,
monsters of the deep,
leaving trails of wake.
The wind has died;
its roar is small as a hollow shell.
The prairie is lashed,
capped with white,
washed stiff as fence posts.

Leslie Schultz (1981)

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Postcard: February 10, 2014

Posted on February 10, 2014 by Leslie Schultz

Happy Christmas and “Winter Walk” (Poem)

Posted on December 25, 2013 by Leslie Schultz

In Northfield, the inauguration of the Christmas season is made official by the annual downtown Chamber-of-Commerce-sponsored event called “Winter Walk”. Every year, it seems, it is better attended. This year, I was able to get a few photographs of the last minute preparations along Division Street and in Bridge Square, before the sun went down and I needed to drive Julia to a Mexican Folklorico performance across the icy Cannon River. On a grey afternoon, I was especially attracted to the lighted star and word sculptures in the windows of The Rare Pair/Clothes for Keeps.

Christmas Tree on Bridge Square (2013)

Just before dusk, dozens of volunteers and merchants were transforming the streets, sidewalks, and shops into an inviting place to stroll, sip warm drinks, window shop, and enjoy a communal and light-hearted response to the dark, icy days ahead. The symbol of this transformation is the luminaria.,Winter Walk’s hallmark: humble brown bags, weighted with a little coarse sand, protecting dozens of tiny votive flames from the chill December gusts. As the dark deepens, these stout-hearted and sturdy lights create a welcome and inviting festival of light.

Maddi Miller, a member of the National Honor Society & Northfield High School Class of 2014, volunteers to light luminaria candles set up along Division Street

It is always fun to see the extra sparkle from the shop windows spill out onto the sidewalks and into Division Street.

This year, there was extra sparkle with the with the art of fire and ice brought by Brett Norgaard with frozen luminaria and sculptures.

April Ripka, owner of The Sketchy Artist, Brett Norgaard (ice candle maestro), and Karin Norgaard at Winter Walk 2013

Winter Walk

Even for bees, winter comes far too soon.
No matter the weight of golden honey
stored, essence of a hundred afternoons,
a million flowers. For us, it’s money.
There is never quite enough, though we keep
making it, saving it, or trying to,
as we watch it drain through need, seep
through pockets faster than it can accrue.

Worried about the utility bill,
mortgage, insurance, we walk to bright displays,
all glitter at the bottom of the hill.
Compelled by the season to spend, we’re dazed
by strings of blinking lights, by crunching snow,
the heat and weight of our scratchy wool coats.
At the square, there are people we know
cheerily shaking hands as though seeking votes,
as though it were possible to elect
a “Merry Christmas” for the whole icy town.
We pause, and smile, and say what is correct.

To our surprise, we have less urge to frown.
A group of carolers draws near: a flock
of turkey-red-faced, singing children. Merchants
fling open doors, forget their gilded stock,
come out to see how spirit switches on.
Glad tidings are infectious.We finally don
gaily appareled hearts, admit this time enchants,
and smell the pines, and marvel at the stars,
rejoicing, holding dear all that is ours.

Leslie Schultz

Swag Gallery Mascot

As we move into that timeless span of days, what I always call “the week between the years”, I hope we can each reflect on what went right last year and the new opportunities that are waiting just around the corner.

Wishing you a “Happy Christmas” and a light heart now and always!

Spooky Fun: Images of Halloween & a Cauldron of Poems: “Beware”, “Doppelganger”, and “Driving to Appleton”

Posted on October 30, 2013 by Leslie Schultz

Halloween is a great time for harvesting pumpkins and reflections, taking stock, and just getting silly. Hope you like the grab-bag below of images, insights, and poems below! (For images of a special dog and a special cat, scroll all the way down!)

In the photo above, what’s scarier? The silhouette of the witch on her broom, posted on the blinds, or the images flickering on the television inside? Your guess is a good as mine but I’m going for the televised images.

When I was in second grade, my best friend and I used to race home from school to see the latest episode of the (now cult classic) television show, Dark Shadows. For those who don’t know or remember, the opening credits are layered over waves crashing at the base of a cliff on the Maine coast, atop which sits a spooky house. The voice-over (a ghost? a warning?) says eerily, haltingly, “My name … is Victoria Winters…” We’d hear that and be off to be deliciously spooked for half an hour. Who knew what would turn up? Vampires? Witches or warlocks? Werewolves? Ghosts? It was all fog and suggestion, a jumble of plot lines we’d try to untangle. Anything might pop out of the closet or the crypt. (A side note: last year, curious to find out what I would think of them now, I rented a few of the early episodes from Netflix. They were hilarious! And my daughter says that the disco dancing–in which actors keep both feet planted in place–is truly scary.)

Back then, my taste for narrative leaned toward the gothic more than it does now, though I still enjoy the atmosphere in a poem like “Maude” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, or “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allen Poe. Back then, I read Ripley’s Believe it or Not as well as Little House in the Big Woods, but when it came to Halloween costumes, I always wanted to be a beautiful gypsy or a fashionable witch, never anything scary or gory. I didn’t think then about how fashion itself can be scary. (High heels? Belly piercings? You see my point.) Then, in college, my first roommate arrived with a subscription to Vogue magazine. During the fall of freshman year, I wrote this poem:

Beware

Vampires are in vogue
this season. See them draped in fur,
gaunt, lurking
in the birches, mad-eyed, or
haunting
smoky restaurants, hungering
for that gleaming
suck of fame.

Later still, encountering the idea in literature of the “doppleganger” or double, I thought about how much of what can truly scare us is what we sometimes see in the mirror: our own worst self looking back at us through our thoughts and actions. There’s always that gap between how we want to be (and be perceived) and what we manage to achieve. Now, that’s scary stuff, kids!

DOPPELGANGER

He is here again, the bad twin,
the other, the feared-but-known.
Where are his eyes? His nose is gone.
All that remains is the grin.

I think he is trying to get in.
The birds have fallen silent.
And then I know. And groan.
He rises from my very bone.

Nonetheless we disavow the doppelganger. We do our best to close that gap between actual and ideal, try not to sag in our intentions to be our best visions of ourselves, to smile, to play (even) through the pain of disillusionment that is just part of the human experience. And it’s funny for me to realize that Halloween, with its traditional juxtaposition of tricks and treats, masks and monsters, ghouls and glitter means more to me each year. Below, a final salute to Halloween in one more poem and several more photographs.

DRIVING TO APPLETON

Pumpkins sleep close to houses.
Evening light covers them with gold.
These farmhouse windows are lit but cold.
Grey barns settle on their stones.
Everywhere sheaves lean
Toward their centers.
Great rolls of hay seem to lumber.
Winter is coming, but now
The culverts are purple with thistles,
The cattle are plump,
And there, in the hollow,
A rusted harrow rests.

The woods beyond
Are full of gossips.
When the moon washes over
The tops of birches,
They’ll ride to the cut fields
To glean
And mend their brooms.

Leslie Schultz

Above, rowan berries: traditional specific against witches–unknown whether it has any effect on gossips.

Winona Media

Poems & Stories From the Heart

Tag Archives: Leslie Schultz photography

Triangles, Triangles, Triangles

In Praise of Snow: Photography & Two Poems (“Like Snowflakes” and “Awaken”) by Leslie Schultz

Postcard: February 10, 2014

Happy Christmas and “Winter Walk” (Poem)

Spooky Fun: Images of Halloween & a Cauldron of Poems: “Beware”, “Doppelganger”, and “Driving to Appleton”

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