What is it about some shapes—simple, play-school-building-block shapes—that defies our failing attention spans? There’s the moon, round as it was the first time I saw it, and just as intoxicating. Here’s a triangular leaf, like all the other leaves I’ve seen. I pick it up anyway and press it in my book. And again, I sit down to write. The squares of the laptop keys beautifully repeat a boxy softwood table.
Or is it that I’m repeating these shapes, as if I were reciting a poem? An epic recitation from birth to death, ongoing in the mind’s blind and dreaming center; an impossible geometry of consciousness pursuing its Euclidean soulmates in the world?

I suspect the latter, if only because there are artists like Patricia A. Bender whose photographs speak the same language as the Peruvian bards of the Nazca Lines or the medieval scribes whose astrological illuminations remain wondrously enigmatic.
Rain falls in thin longitudes outside my window. Nature is always drawing lines around the vulnerable parts of itself. From that vulnerability, Bender’s images extract the imperishable. I’m not sure I know what sacred means. But when I look at images like “Geometry 9” at the top of this feature, I feel pretty certain that I’ve seen it.