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Showing posts from July, 2014

Sketch by Sketch

Inspired by “The Kith of the Elf Folk” by Lord Dunsany These I have drawn: a hillside of moonlit clover; creeks cradled by heather; a forest beyond the stone walls of a pasture. And all just to get home; I’ve been gone so very long. Today you’ll find me in the green layers beyond the city, sidestepping the coiled corpses of men’s dreams, bypassing industrial towns where mechanical beasts gnaw on adolescent hearts. For out here dwell the kith of my childhood: the salamander, fox, rook, and deer. Old friends too are the mosses and ferns, the spirits of pollen, the ghosts of tree rings. All under the watchful eye of Pan. You see, my troubles began as a child. I had become obsessed with humans, would sketch their tall bodies and lively faces on everything from peeled birch bark to rain puddles to hardened flows of sap. I read and reread all the stories about them—romantic tales of knights and beautiful maidens, of epic battles and hidden treasures. To me, the human soul mirrored endles

Neutral Ground

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(In memory of the Western Black Rhino) If I woke outside a dream, then at the dream’s shimmering edge I must have been. Nothing else could explain the rhinoceros at my bedside, its massive form displacing all sense of proportion, the moon giving it a ghastly glow. We remained silent, beast and man, though I could hear its thumping, tribal heartbeat deep inside my chest. I held my breath and switched on the lamp. In response, its head drooped slowly—dark blood spilling from a severed horn. The gates of my childhood swung wide open: rhinos were an early fascination. I had drawn them, collected books about them, shushed everyone in the room when they appeared on TV. I had rhino toys, posters, and cookies. And like dinosaurs, they wandered innocently through my dreams, though never quite like this. Not like now. The images in a recent issue of National Geographic were horrific: the uncensored reality of poachers, the sick demands of the medicinal black market—things childh