All images copyright Bo Rex Moore 2018
Slideshow Gallery / Intimate Ice
All images copyright Bo Rex Moore 2018
Slideshow Gallery Three / Wyoming Skyscape
All images copyright Bo Rex Moore 2018
Slideshow Gallery Two / Wyoming Landscape
All images copyright Bo Rex Moore 2018
Slide Show Gallery One / Wyoming Landscape
Big storm moving in; deer are coming in to town for food and shelter.
3 Young Bucks in town for lunch
The river floodplain as it usually looks; deep deposits of sand and mud.
The floodplain as an “instant” field of Foxtail Barley: an uncommon appearance.
The “Foxtail Blizzard” only occurs if the timing is right; very high flood waters take so long to dry out that the wild grass has limited area to grow. If the flood subsides, but the ground retains moisture, the area becomes a field of Foxtail barley. It ripens fast and the Wyoming wind gathers the millions of dry seeds into low spots, up arroyos, and piles it up along road banks and other obstructions.
I’ve never seen this occur except in this special spot, where the geomorphology is “just right” to produce the “blizzard”. The first time I came across the phenomenon I was so confused; it was like nothing I’d ever seen. From far away it looked like egg custard had flowed across the land.
Rare Event / Foxtail Barley Blizzard
A thought, once it is thought, hangs like a note on time’s bulletin board. So keep thinking.
WILL B BACK
In every woman there is a queen.
Speak to the queen and the queen will answer.
Norwegian Proverb
The TV is on late at night, playing through the darkness of the house, playing with my sleep. A new war dawns over and over and over on the screen. An explosion thousands of miles away illuminates the living room. I press the mute button. Why listen to the noise, when peace for me can be accomplished by simple silence?
Immense sums have been invested to camouflage our soldiers against the new death, which is the same as the old death, but not to armor them against the enemy’s ubiquitous homegrown ingenuity. A simple gaze across history shows that the number of boys who are allowed to become men is limited by old men, who pretend to know nothing about it. For reasons of equality this population reduction now includes women, and those eliminated by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq arrive in my living room on C-17 transports, or so I am told by a reporter, since they only descend to earth after midnight, in deep secrecy.
Our fighters have been cautioned to stifle expressions of pleasure in successful killings, because a war without emotion is held to be clean and just and good. We are better than the enemy, for whom the act of mass murder yields a collective religious exaltation. Do the victims care? Shoot me kindly, shoot me for a righteous ideology, or don’t shoot me at all.
The human body is less aerodynamic than a potato: a potato is ejected from a mud house that has just been shattered on TV by an American rocket, a house that was somebody’s world: not a big fat American world, but somebody’s world.
“We got that sucker big time!” escapes from the soldier who called in the air strike. None of the body parts, bits of a radio, plastic tubs and buckets, nor a thin mattress land in the darkness of my house, but the debris collects somewhere in that bottomless pit called television, where hundreds of thousands of dead bodies go. It’s the New Hades.
The dog lies with her head on the pillow. She watches a video loop that leads up to the destruction of a tank whose price is unknown to those of us who paid for it. Fated to die a thousand deaths on the news channels of the world, its passengers shared stifled fear and stale cheese whiz without humor mere moments ago. Did they suspect that the old men of the Meddling West, sent them to redistribute resources that do not belong to us, including our children’s futures? At the moment of their obliteration, will they understand that the men who run the show in Washington, D.C., don’t have the skill to decide what necktie to wear to a press conference? Will it dawn on these baby ducks in warrior wear, that the old males who have sent them to wander aimlessly in the world’s ideological vortices, don’t give a fuck what happens to them?
Americans are hampered by religious instruction that has never actually been clear to them. “Thou shalt not kill,” is not, and never was, a universal call to disarmament and nonviolence. God simply reserves murder, especially mass murder, for himself. In modern legal terms, the taking of life belongs to The State. The State is composed of old men, who are the true gods on earth.
Citizen shoppers interviewed at a mall send support to our dead troops. They say, Thank-you for killing bad people of a different religion who live somewhere on a map that is utterly blank to us; thank-you for dying so that we no longer must fear dangers that do not exist.
Fighter jets land in my living room, as if the carpet is the deck of a spacious aircraft carrier, docked under a blue sky, somewhere in America. Kids tie yellow ribbons to a chain-link fence, as did the youth of Rome and Carthage. We insist that lies protect children, but when and how do we switch from telling lies to telling the truth that war is neither necessary nor praiseworthy? The trick of war is to produce suffering on a level that is unendurable for civilians and enemy soldiers alike, and to keep it up until the other side gives up, but inevitably, we end up doing this unendurable thing to ourselves.
A WWII veteran dredges for anecdotes that will please the media. Weighed down by the knickknacks of war that oppress his sunken chest, the old man mumbles that the Good War years were the best of his life. Nostalgia penetrates the ether like honeysuckle scent, and I know I’m being told that today’s ruinous war will be remembered with deep affection by future television production companies. “We got those slant-eyed suckers big time!” the old soldier tells America. He adds that the shock from bombs falling near his foxhole burst his eardrums; that bullets from a Japanese fighter that strafed their foxhole made his buddy’s body dance like a rag doll; that a third buddy survived, but spent the rest of his life rotting in a VA psycho ward, very far off camera.
“The war was wonderful,” the old man says. “My memories help me to sleep.”
Essay / “War Helps Me to Sleep”
Not Very 4th of July
Vinyl Siding and Weathered Ribs
The Old Dump, where I used to photograph the battered and brief history of human occupation in this area, was cleaned up and bull-dozed over a few years ago. I still go there, to walk with the dog, but not to take photos. It’s not the same: weeds have moved in, as they do when ground in our desert is disturbed. Lovely weeds, actually. About hip-high, like feathers; dry stems only. The countryside is dried out and blonde: humidity has stabilized at around 10%.
During the day it’s too bleak even for me, but in late evening, the wind may come up and harsh sunlight lowers to cast deep shadows. Walking is enjoyable, with the addition of a “sea of weeds” rolling and bowing under the hot breeze.
Everything is weather-beaten in Wyoming, especially the people.
.
.
Weather-beaten Twig Stand and Old Shed / Flowers
First bouquet: Branches from a cherry tree that has survived 22 winters in Wyoming.
Cherry Blossoms in Wyoming
I like…
Telephone poles
Trees that survive lightning strikes
My kitchen
Men, Women and Fish / Wyoming
Posted on wrong blog: click to be transferred.
https://aspergerhuman.wordpress.com/2017/03/31/men-women-and-fish-wyoming/
Like clouds casting shadows on the earth, frozen gas bubbles are trapped in river ice so clear, it can’t be seen.
Bones from previous years’ hunts are uncovered as the snow clears.
Ice so clear that it can’t be seen
The wind has died down to be followed by cold; I had to bring all the potted flowers inside again with a freeze forecast for tonight. I welcome wild weather, but would like to be able to put my pots outside where I want them and to leave them there. I have always preferred to live halfway outdoors, the boundary of outside and inside thin, variable, never too firm.
Sun low and angled penetrates dirty windows. Cleaning is a worthless task when I naturally want the doors and windows open. The house is a rest stop for waves of clay and sand that drop in as invited guests. A sealed building, no windows open; the air stale, recycled and intensified year after year, offer no escape from the smell of artificial man. These are the places that exist to prove one thing:
God said that we must be punished, but he’s not around most of the time to do it; there are so many of us that it’s become quite a job, so we’ll have to punish ourselves. We are good children; we are obedient; we are civilized.
When I was a little girl, I refused to enter certain houses. It was the smell that repelled me: old rugs, pet urine, strange simmering food, ripe bodies drenched in perfumes, the air misted by canned “deodorizer” – unsuccessfully. A scared animal, I stood trembling at the door, fingers on the door, staying close to the door: THE DOOR, which should I panic, would release me into the yard, onto the sidewalk – a child’s super highway to anywhere; run away.
The desert doesn’t smell, but in the evening, walking, there will be a whiff, a hint of a flower, nearby, calling to insects nearby. Dragged along by noses that scour the ground, the dogs zigzag; halting to sift the dusty mix of spent droppings, tiny footprints, wild stallion pyramids, carcasses of birds.
They never stop sampling the world for treasure.
Being bipedal, I see the rabbit before they do, mere feet from their tense bodies, obsessed bodies. To the dogs it is invisible, unless it moves, if not, they resume their nose-down zigzag, the rabbit impossibly still, its nose moving so slightly, big eyes frozen, as if staring at me. At the perfect instant, it will run, the dogs frantic, howling, insane: a few yards and the rabbit makes one left turn, banking on one-trick survival. It always works.
At home, the dogs go on with the chase, on the floor, dreaming, twitching, as night drops around us, the clock ticking, me restless, wandering to the door, blue night shedding the world. Familiar trees turn black, branching like watercourses, the night deep and dark with sensation, distance, highways, trucks downshifting, trains being made up roughly at the yards – a male place in this feminine desert.
A confident place; the diesels pushing and pulling cargo through town, unrestrained by the forces of light or dark, to stretch across the desert hills like the Great Wall of China on the move.
Prose Poetry / An animal needs to flee
Snowmelt flood was too much for this heavy galvanized under-the-road culvert!
The Power of Water / Culvert Destroyed
Wild horses graze their way to the river and back every day…
Wild Critters / Classic WYO
Rarely do we have enough snow at any one point during winter to build big drifts like this, but this year we’ve seen a return to big storms.
Icicles nearly 3′ long outside my computer room window.
Photo day / My favorite snow fence – icicles
Lurking inside religious belief
is pain and disappointment
in how human beings behave
toward one another.
The response of many religions to this pain and disappointment is to advocate for the increase of evil in the world.
Words to live by: Fundamentals
The red dog joins me at the black dog’s grave,
atop the endless southern plain, not far from the border with Utah;
a spot accessible in snow or mud, and therefore popular for dumping carcasses.
To dig a grave for an elk or a deer would be absurd,
and the litter of white bones from previous hunts surrounds our two figures –
caught between the ground that conceals our friend’s frozen body
and a warning written on the lid of winter’s coffin:
“Wyoming is such an odd place, where no one will expect you to be anything at all.”
Poetry / The Black Dog’s Grave
Road Tar
In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.
Gautama Buddha c. 556-480 BCE
Quote / Buddha
I live in a UPRR town, but bad economic times have reduced rail traffic to almost nothing. I miss the steady chug of diesel engines and cars slamming together as trains are “made up” – and also seeing messages from the outer world.
Artsyberger: Images & Words Aspie Style 
