Textiles In The Landscape: 1st Idea

on

FLORIDA EVERGLADES

My Backyard & Pond



Flagler College Palm Tree Garden



Landscape Research:

Alligator Poem by Mary Oliver

I knelt down

at the edge of the water

and if the white birds standing

in the tops of the trees whistled any warning

I didn't understand,

I drank up to the very moment it came

crashing toward me,

its tail flailing

like a bundle of swords,

slashing the grass,

and the inside of its cradle-shaped mouth

gaping, 

and rimmed with teeth--

and that's how I almost died 

of foolishness

in beautiful Florida.

But I didn't.

I leaped aside, and fell,

and it streamed past me, crushing everything in its path

as it swept down to the water

and threw itself in,

and, in the end,

this isn't a poem about foolishness

but about how I rose from the ground and saw the world as if for the second time,

the way it really is.

The water, that circle of shattered glass,

healed itself with a slow whisper 

and lay back 

with the back-lit light of polished steel,

and the birds, in the endless waterfalls of the trees,

shook open the snowy pleats of their wings, and drifted away,

while, for a keepsake, and to steady myself,

I reached out,

I picked the wild flowers from the grass around me--

blue stars

and blood-red trumpets

on long green stems--

for hours in my trembling hands they glittered

like fire.


The Everglades by Campbell McGrath 

Green and blue and white, it is a flag
for Florida stitched by hungry ibises.
It is a paradise of flocks, a cornucopia
of wind and grass and dark, slow waters.
Turtles bask in the last tatters of afternoon,
frogs perfect their symphony at dusk ---
in its solitude we remember ourselves,
dimly, creatures of mud and starlight.
Clouds and savannahs and horizons,
its emptiness is an antidote, its ink 
illuminates the manuscript of the heart.
It is not ours thought it is ours
to destroy preserve, this the kingdom
of otter, kingfisher, alligator, heron. 
If the sacred is a river within us, let it flow
like this, serene and magnificent, forever.

Landscape Artists:

Paul Maroellini--Fine Art Photography

Sunset in the Santa Fe

Autumn Cypress

Pine Sunset

Sam Vinikoff--American Painter

Sundown in the Glades
Everglades
Marsh View with Herons, Everglades

Landscape Sketches:


Landscape Progress #1:

Backyard





Palm Tree Garden








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