Who is that that dies? Who is there when the dying happens? Is that my friend the Maggie cat, giving up her tiny body in my arms? She rouses herself to push against my chin one last time.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Is that still you, Maggie?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Is that still you, Maggie? Or did you leave a placeholder to say good bye?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Maggie flattens into the deck. She looks through this world into another.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Maggie whittled away from within her fur as she died. She became a sharp bone armature beneath the fur, a sculpture of small dull knives with a will to live, a little will, growing littler.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Sara, someone's Ford, and Sunday morning. This is where life emerges, and submerges into memory again. This is the opposite of dying: the chalice of time filled with the ordinary.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This is me in front of Jonathan Edwards, who talks to the deceased and departed. In the picture, he manages to imitate the deceased and departed with a flair of light. I look passably sad, as though I knew him before he passed into the light flair.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Maggie finds something. It changes her. Light starts to shine through her around the edges.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Maggie is practicing to be a ghost.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

I am practicing to be a ghost.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The symmetries in life are always hidden, except in textbooks. Real symmetry is both a mystery, and an answer to the mystery. The mystery is: how do we know that we are looking at a reflection, and the thing reflected? The answer is: who is knowing?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This is a carrot. It is the first vegetable from my garden. I am confident I will do better next year.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Hello? Hello? I am sorry, you must have the wrong number. In fact, you have the wrong number system, the wrong means of representing "counting" or "order' altogether. Would you care to leave a message?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This is Sam on my roof. He grows, changes, heals. My chimney just gets old, and falls down. The antenna is just for decoration.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This is Sam helping me paint the eaves this June. The scaffold was a spooky thing. It played tricks on me, and made me think that gravity was..well, arbitrary. I didn't know my own "down" any more, when I stood on it, on my old legs. For Sam it was a web, and he was its spider.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Maggie had decided to die at this point. She had just decided, and we didn't know. She tried to tell us, by arranging herself like a shirt, in a drawer, like some inanimate thing that she was to become. At the time, she still had something in her, though, a spirit that could not help looking.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Hey you. Are we father and son? Are we granite? Are we snow? Are the lines written in my face carved by skill or accident? Does Nick know how to hold his own sky aloft, and how will he learn it if he does not know it, if I can't teach him?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

I sleep through the dilemmas of time, and Sara keeps my heart beating with her touch. She includes you in the story.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Sam deflects judgment with a mask. Casey knows the drill, and waits for Sam to return from his gargoyle flight. She is a late angel on Amiens Cathedral, he is a griffen from Notre Dame. Mary suffers them both, she suffers the little children of all ages, in her suffering.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

They look silly for me, at me. But you see them. Who are you, that they might be worth your attention, that you might be worth their silliness? Ah, that is the wrong question. Who are these incarnate songs of consciousness, these petals on the crysanthemum of self-knowing creation?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Nick, you have greatness in you. I tried to show you some of that, on wheels on highways across this whole god damned continent. I hope you saw a little of it, between dreams.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Is the moment in which intense laughter occurs, as long as a moment of silence? According to my friend John Kellden, beauty and intensity are two other measures of time that do not show up on stopwatches. This moment has beauty and intensity, a whole day's worth. Maybe a week.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Sam unties the joke, and it spills on Nick.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Sara, Casey, Sam, Nick. I left a hole in the moment next to Sara. As I stand to snap the picture, everyone mistakes me for the future, for some observer who might react, or judge. I am only the point where their looks converge. Nick is in the picture, but he leaves a hole in my life into which phone calls, thoughts, and prayers fly like bats in the summer night, dark against darkness. I wonder.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Sam turns 18. Nick shows up for his birthday dinner at the Thai restaurant. To my narcissism, they are my image in two very different mirrors. To my heart, they are my heart itself, without complication.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

My face of pleased parent and my son's face of graduating high school. I am shrinking in time and needs, while Sam expands to fill those parts of the world that are not full of themselves yet. Our conventional wisdom says the world is full. His soul, however, perches, and sees worlds where he can yet fly.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Freshme. Exit. Choose.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This is a big empty modern space. There is an achievement of heightened emptyness here. That is different from merely being empty. It is a representation of emptyness that overwhelms your personal relationship to space. You disappear, along with everything else that might have filled this space...ideas, feelings, memories...
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Whomever created this start-up must have had an easy time selling the business plan to the investors....at least the part about holding employee costs down.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Sterling finds pleasure at the end of a flower bag, emerging as though being reborn. The first time wasn't so great for him. This time the paper mother might stay with him longer, and prepare him better for the briars and brambles of life.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This was an unbearable day for Sam. The first weekend in his dorm, the first year of college, he faced demons who had not applied, or been accepted, to his college. But they were there, the dark teachers. Soon he would dance with them. Then he will make the music that will send them on their way.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This pie was one of my best. The filling was the right consistency from the time it cooled down, the crust was flaky, and the raisens in the bottom of the filling created a mincemeat counter point to the crisp, tart granny smith apples. Making a good pie resembles the construction of a good poem, except, the pie cannot proselytize any of our idiotic beliefs to others.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

If Jung is right, and we have shadow selves that rarely connect with our consciousness, consider this: Is it possible that the laptop generation will find ways to put their shadows into the little light boxes, and conjure them at will, by, for instance, letting them live on their MySpace page?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Urban life stretches us to the breaking point. We therefore imagine that living in the country and having painted iron door stops in the form of chickens would mean we had a simpler life, a life that wasn't stretched, but was safe, warm and bearable. If you asked the chicken, you might hear a different story.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Who is to say that parts of us do not split off and become personalities unto themselves, carrying on their own conversations, making their own judgments, expressing in costumes and body language their secret dreams?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

When I spent the month of July laid up with arthritis, the cats decided I had become part of the couch.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

My theory is that the minimalist art movement began in the suburbs, with a tired man who was wild in his heart and deprived in his senses.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

I am glad for this excess and wanton green. It contains me, but does not obey me. It is the mirror of my wife's soul. What I see, when I look into it, is the very texture of love.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The crown of a suburban king hangs heavy on my head, and insolence is the fruit of my garden.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The decay of my eaves is an object lesson in time, mortality and pride for me. I sit in my chaise lounge with my beer and rehearse the lesson: 1. time, 2. mortality, 3. uh....what was the third thing again?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This is my window. If it were your window, you would look more closely. All communication depends upon the narcissim of the audience to succeed. If you can't see yourself in the window, why look? Wait, is that you in there? Hey, who invited you over?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This tree: it cannot make up its mind what direction it wants its branches to grow. Sometimes they seek the sky, sometimes they follow the rifts in the earth's energy fields. Sometimes they follow a sharp tailed swallow, sometimes they follow a kiss escaped the kitchen next door and wafting over to this fool, here.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Sometimes our backyard pictures look like evidence in a trial. We are accused of disorderly nature, and found guilty.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This is the second year we have planted basketball bushes under our deck. We water them with gasoline, and in the fall harvest them in the darkness wearing Knick's jerseys. You think this is strange, but you haven't tasted our fresh picked basketball jellies. They slam-dunk your palate, and set your face on fire.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

We brought thousands of bricks here, and felt haste to build them into something plain and square. When we went home, we looked over our shoulders, and saw the ugliness was gaining on us. We broke into a run. It didn't help.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Sara has discovered flight. It is like being born, although to a smaller world than the world in which she dreams.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

What a prim face. The distance between this buttoned-up Victorian mask and the truth of animals mating contains a long novel about the family farm in America. The last chapter reads "What we brought forth from the soil, we brought forth from our bodies. The end."
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The sky is kissed by big barn lips.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

In the prairies, Giants still walk, and still fill up at the C-Store in Comfrey, Minnesota.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This is where the giants store themselves.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow