I saw a picture
In a museum
Of a campfire
On the shore of a mountain lake at dusk.
The earth was deep and green and quiet granite
Refreshed
And at peace.
But the sky?
The sky was on fire.
The high clouds were sunset orange, red and yellow
Stretching the sky that a 12,000 foot mountain
Proud, timeless
Was nothing more than gray, blocking the moment.
Maybe you’ve seen such a scene
With colors that pulse and flow and blend and change.
Focus on one, and it opens, refreshes and closes
And it’s an hour later than it was a minute ago.
Nature doesn’t know straight lines.
There are light and dark, day and night,
Alive and dead
But there’s living change, again and again between the corners.
When you kill a fish,
You can see the color fade from its scales.
The eyes go cloudy and dark, a change to what is now…
Instead of what used to be.
It’s the same thing with a painting of real life.
It evokes, yes, but it never evolves.
The color of a painted sunset (or a map of a river, or a fish you catch)
Is a captured moment of truth. And it’s already untrue the moment it passes.
This picture in a museum
Was a lake I’d been to a hundred times
And also never, because that moment would never be repeated.
The campfire in the picture was a spark of the blazing sunset above.
In the picture, there was a face
Faced the wrong way
The back of the head glowed in yellow and orange and red.
But the face, annoyed, was bathed in the blue light of a screen.
Opening, refreshing, and closing the same three apps
Again and again.
Andrew Welhouse is a political consultant, fundraiser, and writer who lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and four-year-old daughter. An avid runner, he has completed four marathons and nearly 20 half marathons and is an eight-time winner of the Salt Lake Tribune Political Cartoon Caption Contest.