Small Deaths: The Kiss

the kiss
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

How can dead birds kiss?
Kissing is for the living. What moment more alive?
Yet, here they do
To powerful effect.

From the blurb:
Small lives end every day —
the unfledged bird fallen from its nest,
the unwary lizard caught by a cat
— as unnoticed in dying as they were in living.

Australian, photographer-artist Kate Breakey has been photographing found animal remains
creating stunning, oversized, hand-colored images
that — paradoxically — glow with life.

In the ongoing series, "Small Deaths"
birds, flowers, lizards, and insects
are vividly preserved

"freeze it in time, suspend it in space, immortalize it
so that its beauty and its death are memorialized."

This reminds me of an Andrew Wyeth quote I found a long time ago. Something like...

Most people come to my work through the realism and then discover the abstractness.
A sea shell lying on the sand is frozen in time, eternal.

And I have been hearing the echo of a love song
I just died in your arms tonight
It must've been some kind of kiss

And I have been thinking of something I wrote here,
“I am a habit waiting to be dropped.”

I am no more than that.
A habit
raising to the highest power Her simpler yearning for
“a soft place to land.”
To be held, to be kissed,
and finally to die,
to let go
into Dissolution.

A perfect uniting of opposites –
the Nothing that is Everything.