Corridors, by Kathryn Winograd

Corridors, photography by Kathryn Winograd (USA) contemporary

Corridors
​
The trees drowned by the reservoir engineers surprised me. I had already
found the late winter bluebirds by the shore ice. And a pelican swimming so
close to the bike path in this water made dark by trees that I am told will
soon fall or be cut down. And a striped yellow bird hesitated just long
enough that I caught it forever against driftwood and icicles.
 
Cold, I drove toward the park gate home, but then this swath of trees
stopped me where one mirrored pelican floated above and below the winter
water, a wake of blue strung behind it. What is sky? What is water? I asked
myself. What tissue finite as spider silk suspends itself between this bird of air
and the blind carp that sways just below it?    

There was something about the trees. How reflective they were, how blue
they crisscrossed down to that blur of shore snow I stood in and its chittering
of grass heads that my memory now knits and unravels and knits because
each time, snagged there, is the white bird or the hollow bone of the wing I
once held as a child.
 
When does a photo become an image become poetry? You see, I cropped
out the billowing sky-burst of tree branches and left the pelican so content in
their mirrored scratches. And those small lit cubes of tree trunks where the
sky should be? I left them too, like a chain of paper lanterns calling back all I
love.
 
Kathryn Winograd

"Retired,” Kathryn Winograd writes with her golden doodle daily on the back screen porch of her Littleton home and her hummingbird porch up at her cabin near Phantom Canyon. With camera in hand, she has taken to haunting the wetlands around the neighbouring reservoir and South Platte River and the ranchers’ summer grazing land above the canyon. Her poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and publications and her photography in a growing number of exhibits. More here: kathrynwinograd.com