drmstream

On a trail I walk there is an old tree that has given up life but stands rooted stolidly in the ground. The trunk is thick and black. The sea­sons have embalmed it. The wood is so hard that the bark won’t break off in your hands. The boys pick up stray scraps that have been […]

These young men are wav­ing good­bye as they start the 1000 mile trek from Pitts­burg to New Orleans. They’ll skirt the Allegheny Moun­tains, pass into Ten­nessee and pick up the Jack­son Mil­i­tary Road for the final 400 mile descent to the Mis­sis­sippi Delta and the bay­ous and great swamps sur­round­ing New Orleans. They are following […]

Most men lead lives of quiet des­per­a­tion and go to the grave with the song still in them. Henry David Thoreau The enemy of our soul is the expe­ri­ence of anonymity. Thoreau was mis­guided in his instinct to sep­a­rate him­self from the peo­ple around him and to envi­sion their lives as empty and use­less. The […]

The Bow­ery in New York City in the early 1920’s. Pro­hi­bi­tion is around the cor­ner — then the restau­rant will move up to street level and the liquor store down below.

The sky lit up sul­furous and unnat­ural. The dull thumps and whistling screeches rang in the air, a few beats off. We sat down by the water wait­ing for the town fire­works to start. The coun­try club up the hill was wind­ing their dis­play down. A fam­ily could have sat here 240 years ago and wit­nessed the […]

When­ever we find, in two forms of life that are unre­lated to each other, a sim­i­lar­ity of form or of behav­ior pat­terns which relates to more than a few minor details, we assume it to be caused by par­al­lel adap­ta­tion to the same life-preserving func­tion. Kon­rad Lorenz One hot Fri­day after­noon a long time ago […]

Costi­gan ordered another round. The girl leaned into the bar. Mag­nus lis­tened to her ask ques­tions about their work. She was young and pretty, relaxed with the two men. Costi­gan began to touch her, a palm against the back or a fin­ger at her wrist, in a gen­tle sequence that Mag­nus had wit­nessed before. The […]

The first time I held you We were in the hos­pi­tal room before your mother Came out of recov­ery. I was ragged From the chaotic night, the fast change Into oper­at­ing scrubs, the paced urgency Of the nurs­ing staff as they rolled the gur­ney Through the dou­ble doors, two lives Hang­ing in the bal­ance. You were […]

They stopped us at the bot­tom of the jet­way. We were the first ones to board, had scanned our tick­ets and paced down the car­peted walk­way with the pecu­liar metro­nomic inten­sity of reg­u­lar trav­el­ers. They weren’t ready for us. We were a mot­ley gath­er­ing: a tall, thin woman with a pinched face read­ing a faded […]

The artist who painted this works exclu­sively in images. In her fifty-year career, rep­re­sen­ta­tive images make up a tiny por­tion of her work. She is an abstract artist. This is one of the few works where she uses words. The oth­ers were in a series of reli­gious works that she did mainly in the 1970’s, […]