petalridge.com

 

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PETAL RIDGE:  about the site name

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Petal Ridge, in my fanciful conceit, describes the array of P-topics across my menu bar. To me, my site is all much the same would-be pollinator jostle of garden flowers, wildflowers, and weeds, and I wanted the P's to plant the notion of that commonality in the tabs that signpost us through.

 

It was originally a term I came up with in 2017, to describe a pickerel weed and lotus plant patch in Forest Hill Park where the lake insects like to perch. I'd just been gifted my first DSLR camera; what most quickly drew and startled my eye was this world of perching bugs and birds. I was also writing about some of those pictures*, in a sequence I called "Zoom Lens," and about the ferocity and the loveliness of their sphere of the small—to which I had previously not paid much attention. At the time I created the site name, such thoughts were much on my mind.

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(*The first of them was about a pickerel weed dragonfly. You can read it, as well as a few other sections of "Zoom Lens," in the PIC LIT section, under the POTPOURRI tab.)

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And also I do just find the name pretty!

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The banner image at the top of the portal page dates from the same year, in our garden. The azalea blossoms angling over me also constituted, I decided, a kind of petal ridge.

 

The Pic Lit sonnet that goes with it is posted with other self-portraits in words and pictures at the PORTRAITS tab, also under POTPOURRI. But not being averse to site duplication, I'll post it here too.

 

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A Dropped iPod Portrait of the Poet at 67

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The face anchors the left third of the frame,

full profile. The turned gaze lifts past it, where

someone, the tilt suggests, has called his name.

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It's not a young face. That crinkled brow may

be mere frown folds, but the wisp-silver hair,

the hollow cheeks, flesh rolls under the eye

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affirm the state of things. The frayed shirt collar,

nudging the crop line, hints at harder wear.

Yet over him the spring sings into color;

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azaleas spry as salmon, as he bends

to fetch his dropped toy camera, puff their

green/pink underparts at the flashing lens,

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while in an aqua sky, jade tops of trees

dunk frond tiaras in a gauzy breeze.

 

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