Quotes from Cole Swensen

My focus is on the rhythmic relationship between body and ground and the visual relationships among the elements of the always-changing scene.

There is inside it something sun.

most words for ghost are pieces of mica that carefully layered will make a window out of fire. It's cold and the faces at the window do what faces usually do they open onto a genetic history that looks up suddenly and it's the eyes everyone says you can't say that's not alive

Or a ghost is a knot in the otherwise smooth flow of time, an electrical storm in a jewelry box, grief perfectly aligned. And sometimes a ghost is a shared thing; sometimes the entire population of a city or country will just happen to look in the mirror at the same time, and from then on there was a city in the sky, as all cities are if we consider that the sky reaches to the ground, and this city, too, thought it was alive, and the candles walked off by themselves.

Five The air across the valley is slightly hazy though thinning though patches remain between the groves of trees that edge a clearing in which stands a single house. A child in a white t-shirt has just walked out of the house and is turning to walk down to the lake.