Barn and a Sky of Weathered Tin

Barn with Tree

Barn with Tree © 2015 Bo Mackison

…after a time the trees stood skeletal against a sky of weathered tin. The land lay bled of its colors. The nights lengthened, went darker, brightened in their clustered stars. The chilled air smelled of woodsmoke, of distances and passing time. Frost glimmered on the morning fields. Crows called across the pewter afternoons. The first hard freeze cast the countryside in ice and trees split open with sounds like whipcracks. Came a snow flurry one night and then a heavy falling the next day, and that evening the land lay white and still under a high ivory moon.”
~ James Carlos Blake in Wildwood Boys

Possibility

Tumbleweed in Barbed Wire Fence

Tumbleweed Fence © 2013 Bo Mackison

Winds that once blew free,
now scatters dust to the sky.
~ lyrics from The Cowboy, by Randy Newman

Wandering, I am lost.

I speed along the washboard dirt road, skimming its ridges,
Don’t jar me, bumping along dips and rises.

Earth so dry, wild and unsettled winds sweep orange dust into roiling vortexes,
chase tumbleweeds across the grasslands.

Hello, tumbleweeds, caught in the barbs and fence lines,
impaled on gnarled mesquite.

Globes of sun-bleached gold, you can no longer travel on wind’s breath,
whipping forces crumble your desiccated skeletons.

Tumbleweeds, no more wandering and skittering across this land.
I know how it feels to be trapped, too, unable to roll away.

Ominous clouds, they are possibility.
Desert rain is never a promise, yet
when seeds swell with moisture, they open.

——————–

Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is exploring creative photography and emotion in a  series called Desert Lines – a combination of visual lines and written lines.