Calaveritas White

Things don't stay white-white long in this ghost town.
Any linen leans toward bone, rust cavorting & settling
down in the seams. Paper is fungal, earthy, like a chantarelle.
Our well pulls iron into the drinking water, and from
the guts of our gardens enormous flaking sawblades
emerge, thick and dark as bars of chocolate. These we don't
eat, but keep around like silent presences, toothy, rotting,
fertile.

Yet there is a mushroom that appears in the early spring
dubbed Cowboy's Handkerchief. It is clean & brilliant like the white
of an eye, slimy as snot. A single one of the chickens next door
lays pure white. The innocence of these eggs is particularly astonishing
to me, and I have begun making photographs with them, using
their absorbent white to capture color and the imprints of other
equally fleeting objects. The dye I've made is of black walnut -
from the tree next to Frank Trenque's bench - and the patterns
on the shells are poppy leaves, intricate weeds, borage.