petalridge.com
the website of
Derek Kannemeyer
PETAL RIDGE: about the site name
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.
(*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.)
And also I do just find the name pretty!
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.
A Dropped iPod Portrait of the Poet at 67
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.
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
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;
azaleas spry as salmon, as he bends
to fetch his dropped toy camera, puff their
green/pink underparts at the flashing lens,
while in an aqua sky, jade tops of trees
dunk frond tiaras in a gauzy breeze.
