Photo Credit: Sally Lelong is a visual storyteller working in a variety of media that lend themselves to use in a conceptual framework. She lives and works in New York, and routinely exhibits her work in a variety of settings from print to thematic installations to street art.
by Frederick Pollack
The virus: few cars; the tone
and freshness of the air, more astonishing
with every isolated walk –
compounded from so many scents,
earth, the tannin
of leaves, citrus somewhere …
The taken-for-granted joy of a distant dog.
And those videos – Welsh
goats, highway
ducks, elk
sunning at Starbucks – possess
for the leisured an inescapable
rightness: the gaze
suggests reciprocity, as if we
had made, were making
a generous, almost carefree –
kingly or ascetic –
gesture of abdication.
Frederick Pollack is the author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both published by Story Line Press; the former to be reissued by Red Hen Press, and two collections of shorter poems, A POVERTY OF WORDS (Prolific Press, 2015) and LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018). His work has appeared inHudson Review, Salmagundi, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Fish Anthology(Ireland),
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Great poem. “Few cars” really resonated with me. I’ve been taking long walks daily since COVID hit, and the one great thing was the complete lack of traffic in the first months. Now that everyone’s driving round and round (Where are they going? Many things are still closed.), the tranquility is gone.
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