Richard Hugo

I'll often take a picture and then later look at it and see that I'm not sure what I'd been looking at, what I'd actually seen when I'd taken the picture.

That's just me having done something and trying to make something out of it after I've done it.

I do this a lot, almost all the time.

Richard Hugo the poet said that a photograph is a kind of death, or something very close to that.

That sort of language intellectualizes a situation that is instinctual or instinctualizes a situation that is intellectual.

It means that the thing I'm looking at is alive when I'm looking at it, and dead when I'm done looking. And that taking a photograph of it or writing a poem about it is a way of keeping alive what was alive when I was seeing it and dead the moment I stopped, thereby making both life and death permanent in my mind.

Why did I take the picture of the small oak tree on which the moss was hanging? I can't remember.

It was just yesterday. I was out walking with friends in a forest in San Luis Obispo.