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Espalda

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Out of Stock

Out of stock

Espalda is a little etching I made for a holiday card. I lost the plate years ago, but saw the print framed at my friend’s house every time I visited her in New York. This year, cleaning out the basement, I found the plate again, and restarted the edition. The quote in the bottom corner is an excerpt from a poem by Theodore Roethke, whose sense of the earthy and the infinite inspires much of my own writing.

from The Far Field (part III) by Theodore Roethke

The river turns on itself,

The tree retreats into its own shadow.

I feel a weightless change, a moving forward

As of water quickening before a narrowing channel

When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;

Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent

And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, --

At first a swift rippling between rocks,

Then a long running over flat stones

Before descending to the alluvial plane,

To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.

The slightly trembling water

Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;

And the crabs bask near the edge,

The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, --

I have come to a still, but not a deep center,

A point outside the glittering current;

My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,

At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,

My mind moves in more than one place,

In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by death, thought of my death,

The dry scent of a dying garden in September,

The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.

What I love is near at hand,

Always, in earth and air.


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