2) Picture Haikus

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I walked around a corner
in downtown Butte,
and there they were, those black cut-outs,
hanging around the square like phantoms,
the shadows of the missing people
from those colourful lounge chairs
I had photographed years earlier
in Gila Bend, Arizona.
Around the next corner I found the "Haunted Hotel",
and in the local bookstore that night
plenty of "Montana Ghost Stories".

Houses have faces
and characters,
like people.
This one, with the wrinkles on its forehead,
made me laugh and feel sad
at the same time.

I don't know
how long it's been
since anyone has sat down
on those chairs.
They didn't seem to miss people much.
They were involved
in deep conversation
amongst themselves.

I never saw his face.
The man unlocked the door
to the local AA center in Paris, Texas.
I had lost sight of Travis eighteen years ago,
but for a split second,
I thought it was him.

It took me hours to find somebody
who could open up the lobby
of the old "Stout's" hotel on Main Street in Gila Bend.
It had been closed for years already.
That painting over the Coke machine haunts me ever since.
It's the dream version
of the perfect beginning
of a road movie.

I was somehow reminded of Truffaut's "Fahrenheit 461"
on my Sunday morning stroll through Butte.
In Bradbury's science fiction novel
"used books" would have been a contradiction in terms,
and would only have been available
in stores like this one.

All day long
I had wanted to photograph
one of those hills
with the little dark bushes.
At dusk,
when I had given up on my desire,
I found the one
I had been looking for.

The wooden church next to the Indian Cemetery
was all boarded up.
I walked around for an hour
and read all the names on the graves.
Some of the men had died in the Vietnam war.
Travelling Wolf had died before.
According to the cross on his grave
he was 22 years old,
when Edward Curtis photographed the Blackfeet Indians
in this part of Montana, in the year 1900.

Summers are short in Montana
and the sky bigger than anywhere else.
Those hay rolls looked like pawns
in a giant chess game.
The nearest town was called "Choteau."

Why do so many parking structures
look so ugly,
if they can look so perfect, too?