The Torn Screen Poem by Smoky Hoss

(I wrote this prose observation after studying the 1937 photograph of Lee Miller, entitled: Portrait of Space)
- There's a torn screen framed around the window of the mind. Thoughts, like flies, buzz in and out at will.
The view beyond the screen is a vast and distant desert, not a wasteland mind you, rather a far flung wonder of enchanting possibilities, just beyond site, in the shadows of mesas, canyons, caves, and arroyos, formed by a mysterious wind, that at will blows the soft dust of dreams, desires, and ideas through the riven screen -
But why is the tear there? For that matter why is the screen even there? And why, as a matter of fact, is the window there? Why not just open air, wide open space?
Perhaps each small view of the desert, of nature, needs to be framed to be seen for what it is, what possibilities lie therein … Taking in too much at once depletes the details, of infinity found in sparse spaces of this finite world. So to frame is to notice more fully, to observe more keenly, to see more intently. Like a photograph captures a place mingling with a moment, it is a glimpse of something beyond here and now, of something eternal. Perhaps even in the smallest section of the world, the weight of eternity residing there was too much for the screen to bear, thus momentarily captured, it could not be fully contemplated and tore its way out of the frame. But, it was seen, and more importantly felt. The tear in the screen left looking, perhaps longingly, toward the ubiquitous, forever desert, is a sign, a pointing out, that life, even in small doses, has a power beyond human containment, or even explanation.