Looking Up (Church Frieze, Brentwood, LA)

My eagerness to freight coincidences and chance sightings with special meaning verges, I know, on pareidolia – a psychological condition in which someone reads faces or symbols into random phenomena. People may see the Virgin Mary in a burnt tortilla, or Satan’s face in the billowing smoke of the burning World Trade Center.

Maybe that’s why I’ve been so drawn to poetry for most of my life. All poets are afflicted with pareidolia to some degree.