Elvis Pressley's birthplace

Tupelo, Mississippi

“Your nearness was the scent of coffee in a fragile cup.  We talked in fingers of finely entangled thread, distilled in cloistral secrecy, bouquets of white chartreuse.  When you drove to town for the mail, your absence turned the sun’s rays to dangling straw.

      -J.W. Rivers

Rowan Oak

(William Faulkner's home)

Oxford, Mississippi

“I thought love was being vulnerable.  I thought love put an ache in your hands, the kind of ache that begs you to see a body the way the blind do.”

           -Heather Arrington

Rowan Oak

(William Faulkner's home)

Oxford, Mississippi

“Sometimes I sound like gravel.  And sometimes I sound like coffee and crème.”

            -Nina Simone

Square Books

Oxford, Mississippi

“There was a well of spirituality, an understanding of mystery, Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery that presided over everything.  Spirit Dogs.  That’s what the Sioux had called the horses in the tribal days.  Loyal, intelligent, intuitive, and capable of guiding you to the spirit coursing through you.”

            - from the novel Dream Wheels by Richard Wagamese  

Back Porch

Shawnee, Oklahoma

“The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.  That’s why the taste of it drove us from Eden.  That fruit was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.  God had probably planned to tell us later about this new pleasure.  We stuffed our mouths full of it.”

            -from the poem “Contraband” by Denise Levertov

Crow Visit

Galveston, Texas

“It nearly cancels my fear of death, when I think of cremation.  To rot in the earth is a loathsome end, but to roar up in flames – besides, I am used to it.  I have flamed with love or furry so often in my life, no wonder my body is tired.  We had great joy of my body.  Scatter the ashes.”

-from the poem “Cremation” about something Robinson Jeffers’ wife told him before she died

Near NASA

Houston, Texas

“The Kingfisher rises out of the black wave like a blue flower, in his beak he carries a silver leaf . . . hunger is the only story he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.”

            -from the poem “The Kingfisher” by Mary Oliver

Galveston, Texas

“I look west and hesitate.  I lament.  Here where opposing armies passed through.  Palaces of countless rulers are now but dust.  Empires rise: people suffer.  Empires fall: people suffer.”

            -from the poem “Recalling the Past at T’ung Pass” by Chang Yang-Hao

Galveston, Texas

"Galveston", Jimmy Webb and Lucinda Williams:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bK8wU47BUk

Galveston, Texas

“[We are like] flies crawling on a window, fluttering up and down, seeing the outside beyond reach because of the invention of glass that couldn’t be undone.  We lived within the outside for two million years and now it’s mostly photos.  We chose wallpaper and paint over leaves and rivers.  In our dream of safety we decided not to know the world.”

            -from the poem “Modern Times” by Jim Harrison