new grapes

I have to remind myself that these photographs are attempts to capture something, something like a reality, that I have yet to define. I am evading the photographic tendency to define, capture, however you like. This isn't about taking good photographs, an art I have no ambition towards, but about a kind of visual stutter in reaction to what language might too easily render smooth.

And I look on them as a kind of accident that allows these reflections.

I have yet to more than pass by the vineyard. I have not pruned, nor set wire, nor done any forthright thing for these ten acres of vines. I am circling the guilt I feel for its shortcomings and the hardships I have put my mother through. Circling also the ignorance I am left with in regards to how it should be run.

Though the vines live, and shall, for decades.

I do not know if I believe that.

Tomorrow I will find my shears and dismount the hill to our floodplain vineland and set my body to its stone.