This work's text layer, which can be read fully--but with effort--is a poem≈ of mine (see below) about a bear navigating itself to secluded and peaceful Ravenna Park. The park was named for its wild-ish ravine and is near both the geographical center of Seattle and the University of Washington. It was my neighborhood park for twenty years.
37" x 15" photographic archival pigment print on 310 gsm matte photorag paper, mounted onto 50" x 25" fringed, handmade Thai mulberry paper featuring string and water dimples. Variable edition of 6.
Ravenna Park, Seattle
Here, closer to the city’s heart than to its reach,
below the high and failing bridge
unsound enough to echo every footfall from one end to the other,
and to dance itself the hundred yards in curving rhythms,
they found a bear. Caught it, weary
and confused by ancestral memory faulty as the steel and concrete,
by following scent of elsewhere through a thousand backyards
filled with barbecue grills and chaise lounges, old hoses, mowers,
and chained up dogs so lonely that the bear did weep,
by crossing street after street, all akin—
except each day with bigger houses and with smaller yards,
and by the weight of human geometry and by a gathering of misgivings.
Yet it found here.
They found it.
They caged it, the errant bear, and restored it to a place
more like where it chose to leave than where it dreamt of going.
There are sneakers in the tree,
100 feet at least above twin streams where the graynesses of sand
shape the sound of simple water into siren’s scat
gathering birdsong as is glides along the steep ravine walls.
What but a sanctuary built of being, held by footsteps and by flapping wings
Can fill a rift so rightly with naught but time and other passing things?
