drmstream[writing]

  When I walked out­side the wind was rac­ing through the trees and I thought to myself, This is alive. This is alive, the wind, the sky, the air. This is alive, me in this moment, my foot sink­ing into the ground. This is alive. The moment passed as quickly as it man­i­fested. Later I took a walk […]

The ice forms sur­rep­ti­tiously, against all prob­a­bil­ity, when win­ter takes a river.  The pieces form inad­ver­tently, bound by the cold, and col­lide into each other, adhered by the quick­en­ing of the silky black water.  It’s like a crowd of sum­mer lilies — but it isn’t.  The pieces of ice are jagged and uneven, thick and […]

This is how we age, the way Fall unfolds, not all in a rush, but in pieces and slow, at night when we sleep and the body cools. We’re young still in parts, the ver­i­ta­ble green shoots of youth sprout­ing through the enflamed palette of age, the stag­ing of decay. This is our most profound […]

In my imag­i­na­tion, I am hang­ing this can­vas when I feel a frost on my cheek and the lin­ing of my lungs ices over. I am drawn head­first into the inky blue light of the river. The crisp snow abrades my raw hands. The bark of the tree fall scratches on my shirt. The cold […]

A few heads turned, like ani­mals at a water­ing hole. Then a few more, and they started to walk, these hip­pos and rhi­nos, egrets and water boars, zebras and ante­lope that we were packed with onto the sear­ing hot strip of sand between the crash­ing waves and the clut­tered edge of the Del­marva Penin­sula. T. […]

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 […]

I was a deaf boy and the trees spoke to me. I walked through the woods at night. The wind rioted around me, pulling at leaves and branches, try­ing to tear the roots from the ground. The moon­light turned hard and thin. The air was cold with the salt spray from the bay. The trees moaned dully. […]

Look at the photo and imag­ine. I am remem­ber­ing. The field was nar­rower and bor­dered by a thin wall of trees that sep­a­rated one field from the next. In win­ter, the frozen ground crunched beneath your boots, and the brit­tle corn stalks crack­led like stale cereal. The col­lar of your old army coat is bunched […]

I, for one, wel­come my Nean­der­tal ances­try. It may not sound like a lot — between 1 and 4 per­cent. But that’s the equiv­a­lent of one great-great-great grandparent’s DNA con­tri­bu­tion. In the case of the Nean­der­tal con­tri­bu­tion, more than 1500 gen­er­a­tions ago, it’s an endur­ing legacy of an ancient group of peo­ple, spread across many […]

The set­ting is so casual; it’s as if the extras were told to take a break, and some lay back to nap before the film­ing started back up again. The com­po­si­tion is ele­gant and clas­sic. The effect mutes the meta­phys­i­cal truth of the photo: This pic­ture chron­i­cles death. The fine line of the per­spec­tive draws our […]