kill the coyote v.2

On November 8, 2023January 28, 2025 By ©️K.T. 2025In Alpenglow, Lament, land, Poem, poetryLeave a comment

i won’t warn you with
my voice, anymore

tell me,
how do you calmly
tell someone to
“look, brake, stop, now, please”
in a nano-second?
calm but with desperate urgency?
without amplification?
without proselytizing?
without the infusion or projection of panic?
without the prescience of the future unfolding in the very moment?

tell me,
i’ll wait,

while you kill the coyote

crossing the road

that crosses razed forest

clear-cut for runs and Aprés-ski,
for lumber to build the 3-day-stay mansions – which they unironically call, “cabins,”
a settlement of a pop-up-Bavaria™️ for them in the valley of the mountains of

the Sangre de Cristo?

the lifeblood of the Red Willows.

the very same road

to access the trailhead
to the pristine glacial lake
with views of Taos Peak

a profanity of epithets

“williams” lake

“wheeler” peak

where you go, unironically,

to briefly escape

this World,
the violence of this World,
your World

the one constructed in your image,

and in your favor

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in the Limineen, on the threshold

On April 12, 2023July 21, 2023 By ©️K.T. 2025In Arte Bucolia, Arte Ruralia, earthlings, ki, kin, liminality, limineen, Sol, Sun, Sunset, thresholdLeave a comment

"[S]he said that a [hu]man had to escape to the country to see the world whole and that [s]he wished [s]he lived in a desolate place like this where [s]he could see the [S]un go down every evening like [the] [g]od[head] made it to do." 

~ Flannery O’Connor

Deer and Bird and Frog People
in the Limineen of light and dark
as witnessed in The Great Lakes
of the North american continent
April 11, 2023

The Song of The Lark

On December 30, 2022May 29, 2025 By ©️K.T. 2025In art, art criticism, Beauty, Golden Hour, Magic Hour, mystery, Poem, Sunrise, SunsetLeave a comment

The Song of the Lark has always been one of my very favorite works of the French naturalists – the gorgeous, day-glo, corally-salmon Sun and the woman’s arrested and reverent attention — her ear-witness to the birdsong — she reminds me of myself on any given day at golden hour — dawn or dusk //

while most criticism — almost all criticism of this work agrees that this painting depicts a woman at dawn — at Sun’s rise: i’m not wholly convinced.

i have experienced Jules Breton’s “The Song of The Lark” twice in two separate exhibits — at its home in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago; and most recently, in 2015, at the University of Nebraska’s Sheldon Museum of Art for “Visual Cather: The Writer’s Pictorial Imagination” — where i was able to linger a mere foot away from the painting, studying it, for as long as i wanted — i stayed there for a reverent half hour in its glow.

Visual Cather:
The Writer’s Pictorial Imagination

Author Willa Cather spent her formative years in Nebraska and was an alumnus of the University of Nebraska; her third novel, published in 1915, was named for Breton’s painting — The Sheldon was a natural recipient for a loan of this magnetic artwork ///

while viewing the painting at The Sheldon, i conversed and queried with the fellow-Chicago-born docent — the only other person in the gallery:

will the lark sing their song most sweetly or urgently at sunrise or sunset?

does this work actually depict a neon sunset in the west; or is it, in fact, a day-glo sunrise in the east?

DayGlo color, pigment, paint would not be invented and commercially available until the 1930s — yet, Breton painted his glorious Sun in 1884 — he had already figured out the recipe ///

and, is the woman’s fatigue residual — from yesterday — she, a worker rising so very early, again, — or, might it be fatigue from a just-completed long and hard day’s work under the Sun?

i asked the docent the rhetorical questions i had been silently asking myself.

is it both? it’s both? it’s both.

let the mystery be*

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