Dining Room Table

Star House

I followed Cache Creek north to the foothills of the Wichita Mountains, where great sentinels of ochre outcrops keep watch over the bluestem prairie.  Where the great Comanche Chief Quanah Parker’s sanctuary once stood.  Called Star House, it had large white stars painted on the roof to let the world know he had great power like the Generals at nearby Fort Sill, where Geronimo and many others were imprisoned. 

Quanah Parker and dining room

Star House 

Source:  Internet

But now in the foothills, along a road piercing pastures of Indian blanket and blue indigo, a sign says “artillery may be fired over roads in this area”.  After the Army grabbed Quanah’s land for an artillery range, the house was moved and then again to an amusement park even more dilapidated and forgotten than Star House.  Where it sits sighing at night and during the day sucking the summer heat through broken windows; exhaling through holes in the roof, between the white stars, as they slowly fade and fall into the earth.

“I remember all of my ancestors and what the ground felt like back then, to them.  Also the thickness, the scent, and the quality of the air . . . “
                -Natachee Momaday Gray, poet, artist, videographer

Lucinda

Setting Off

“Our souls are travelers.  You can tell when your own is gone.”

            -from the poem “Angry Women” by Jim Harrison

Oklahoma Prairie

"Of course the reader should be mindful that I'm a poet and we tend to err on the side that life is more than it appears rather than less."
            -from the poem “Rumination” by Jim Harrison

Star House

“I love life and I love art and I love memories and I love love . . . always feeling everything very deeply, always considering how each piece affects my own life, enjoying some new learned mindfulness, finding comfort in discomfort and always exploring, wanting to learn more and more.”
            -Natachee Momaday Gray, poet, artist, videographer

Mad Mouse Rollercoaster

Eagle Park

Cache, Oklahoma

Mad Mouse . . .

A man told me his father died from falling off the top of this roller coaster when it was being assembled.  As a result, it was never operational.   

Lucinda

Cache, Oklahoma

“Once in his lifetime a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe.  He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it.  He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it.  He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind.  He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.”
            -from The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday

Cache, Oklahoma

“Loneliness is only a theory when we have the past, which is a vast tumble of events.”

            -from the poem “The Dog and Tobacco Room” by Jim Harrison

Bedroom
Star house

“I walk my dog Rose in the alleys throughout town.  Maybe it’s where poets belong, these substreets where the contents of human life can be seen more clearly, our shabby backsides.”

            -from the poem “Livingston Suite” by Jim Harrison

Star House

“ . . . moving water, the holy form of time.”

            -from the poem “Buried Time” by Jim Harrison

Star House

"Often we are utterly inert before the mysteries of our lives, why we are where we are, and the precise nature of the journey that brought us to the present."

                   -from The Ancient Minstrel by Jim Harrison

Chickasha Hotel

Chickasha, Oklahoma

“Despite gravity we’re fragile as shadows.  They crush us with time-as-money, the linear hoax.”

            -from the poem “Buried Time” by Jim Harrison

Lucinda

Going Home

Romulus, Oklahoma

“All my life I’ve liked weeds.  Weeds are botanical poets, largely unwanted.  You can’t make a dollar off them.”
           -Jim Harrison

Washita Theatre

Chickasha, Oklahoma

“The birds and their omnipresent language, their music, have resisted conclusions as surely as the stars above them which they use for navigation.  I have prayed willingly to their disinterest, the way they look past me into the present, their songs greeting both daylight and dark."
            -from the poem “Poet Science” by Jim Harrison