diptychal

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

-Ernest Hemingway

The day I took this photo, I didn’t really notice the young man in the background. I was focused on the older man, leaning forward, reading what I assume is a prayer book. I noticed his crisp white gallabeya. I noticed the age-stained stones surrounding us. The hard benches. When I got home and looked closer, I saw so much more. I saw faith across ages. I saw echoes. I saw two men, communing with God, together and alone. They are so different. One in jeans and a shirt, dark black hair.  The other old, his white hair covered by a whiter skull cap. And yet, they are the same.

Chema Madoz is genius.

like doors closing, in a hollow apartment,
or in the hidden hallways of a doctor’s office
filled only with white leather chairs and dead air

it’s an empty sound
hiding behind accoustic polyweb strings
that have never been played

in the corners of a room that forgot
how to laugh
where men died of cancer
and pictures of saints gathered dust

it is the sound of a ribcage
cracking

of jaw bones breaking

when they try to smile

it is

what it sounds like

with you

gone.

There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

-Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith