More on: landscape

I cut a hole in the ice each winter, an extraordinary black trapezoid—“avanto” in Finnish—intended for the bracing plunge to follow the extreme heat of the Finnish sauna. The shape carries so much personal meaning.

I came to see the ark in this space as a kind of well at the heart of an imaginary landscape, the symbolic source of life. This metaphoric landscape is a constant reminder of the longing for the physical Holy Land.

One way to describe what O’Keeffe did with landscapes is to say that she was trying to figure out a way to look out at the horizon and to see things out there as deeply as she was able to see things like flowers and plants up close.

I used to ask myself why humans go through sacrifices and insist on creating things that no one asked for or cares about. But not anymore. I realize that, in my case at least, it is simply an instinctive drive to do, and that’s my way of being.

So little is legible: glacial till, the moonlight on an iced-over ditch, The moon itself—an opal pruning hook. He could go on like this: list after list, A compendium apropos of nothing more than to place the speaker here, Pointing north, bewitched like a compass needle. Hard to make much that resembles poetry out of…