The rust stains floating down
from the stubs of rebar poking through
the concrete skin of an overpass.
Near a traffic circle in New Jersey.
You are on your way to the Shore,
you have to go over another bridge,
over the back bay.
That smell, of quahogs and funk and life and
summer heat complete with whirling gulls.
Is this what you mean by beauty?

Will you find your truth in groping
and grasp it dear in rigid fingers
only to watch it wither in the light
of indifferent thermodynamics?
As the iron becomes the air
in salt surrender,
the pretty little lights of meaning
blown out by the furious volume
of information
and inarticulate disorder.

The mark just above the corner of a
lipsticked mouth,
to the right of a delicately flared nostril.
Anywhere else it would be a mole,
in the center of the forehead,
it’s a third eye,
or an eyesore.
This incident of melanin and
raised dermis.
Is this beauty?

These things we fix our eyes
and ears upon
moving like us,
always away from perfections.
If only.
If only we could find our hearts
locked in tight embrace with thoughts
as we fall in love
with our notions of truth and beauty
fickle and inconstant,
changing forever.

Dave Grill 2005

And thanks for including “Camden Hill.” Astounding use of perspective in that photo.

At some point in the history of Aesthetics it seems to me, the word began to take on a meaning more closely related to a type of perceptual Opinion, I’ve heard may times “well, its a matter of your Aesthetics”. Yet its roots are derived from the Greek, meaning Perception. Certainly perception is subjective, yet I find it a loss that this word for our basic mysterious cognitive functions have drifted so far from its origin. All to often people think of the arts or a work of art from the point of view of “I like this, or I don’t like that” - the act of perception becomes an act of making a judgment, thus Aesthetics becomes equated with ones opinion. I would say that in fact this is contrary to the act of perception, the field of Aesthetics, once a judgment is made, or opinion is created, the act of perception is shut down, their is no longer the space for an Aesthetic experience, what the aesthetic philosopher Maxine Greene calls the Transactional moment, that is the experiential transaction between a work of art and the viewer. For me the greatest problem with this historically rich and loaded word, is it has become so vague over time. What is a personal aesthetic from a perceptual point of view? Or has the word drifted so far from its origin that it no longer has a foundation in basic straight forward perception?

Besides that, it introduced me to the head turning work of Masao Yamamoto

So thank you for that!