a poem


WOULD-LAND




5 AM. One-quarter past.
Distant chimes inform me this.

A bell peal knells the mist.
And sunlight’s

not yet bludgeoning.
But some light gets blood going.

Last night it was snowing
and now

every path’s a pall.
Though mine the only footfalls

at this hour of awe. Above
hangs a canopy of needle leaf.

Below, the season’s
mean deceit—

that everything stays
white and clean.

It doesn’t, of course,
but I wish it. My prayers

are green with this intent,
imploring winter wrens

to trill and begging scuttling bucks
come back.

There’s something that I lack.
A wryneck

bullet-beaks a branch.
His woodworm didn’t have a chance.

What I miss,
I’ve never had.

But I am not a ghost.
I am a guest.

And life is thirst,
at best.

So do not strike me, Heart.
I am, too, tinder.

I’m flammable
as birch bark, even damp.

Blue spruce, bee-eater—
be sweeter to me.

Let larksong shudder
to its January wheeze,

but gift these hands a happiness
just once.

It is half passed.
And I am cold.

Another peal has tolled.
I’ve told the sum of my appeals.

I need not watch for fox.
They do not congregate at dawn.

But I would,
were I one.

© 2011, Jill Alexander Essbaum
From: Poetry, Vol. 197, No. 4, January, 2011




to love a picture



"my feelings toward your picture are none of your business"

“i just love your picture, not you. perhaps you would ruin all of my dreams, so i dont want you as i only know your photo”

Thanks to Ozkan

well played

I think you're finally rid of me.
Took a village, didn't it though?
*
*
*
This gorgeous image is by LiLiROZE
and the quote is by Poe.


“From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.” ― Edgar Allan Poe

of dreams awakened o' lucky ones

"And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreathed trellis of a working brain,
With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
To let the warm Love in!" (lines 58–67) John Keats - Ode to Psyche

Photobucket Pictures, Images and Photos

Photo by Herbert Bayer (April 5, 1900 – September 30, 1985)

the day was duller

Photobucket Pictures, Images and Photos
Francesca Woodman (American, 1958-1981)

The Darker Sooner
BY CATHERINE WING
Then came the darker sooner,
came the later lower.
We were no longer a sweeter-here
happily-ever-after. We were after ever.
We were farther and further.
More was the word we used for harder.
Lost was our standard-bearer.
Our gods were fallen faster,
and fallen larger.
The day was duller, duller
was disaster. Our charge was error.
Instead of leader we had louder,
instead of lover, never. And over this river
broke the winter’s black weather.

Mobile Arts Festival


A gallery of images shot with the three-lens Olloclip iPhone accessory gives a taste of what's to come what organisers are saying is the world's largest 'mobile arts' festival. The L.A. Mobile Arts Festival begins this Saturday at the Santa Monica Art Studios in Los Angeles, California.
The nine-day event will encompass not just camera phone photography, but also video, sculptural and performance art related to mobile devices.
The event will showcase upwards of 600 individual works created by more than 240 artists from over 30 countries around the world. Submissions came not only by email, but in keeping with the newfangeled spirit, also via Twitter and Instagram.
“This is a celebration of this young medium,” said Nathaniel Park, co-founder of iPhoneArt.com, which organized the festival.


The work of Helen Breznik (Instagram handle helenbreznik) will be included in the L.A. Mobile Arts Festival, which starts this Saturday and will feature 600 mobile art images and video, sculptural and performance installations.


Further work will be showcased online once the festival is under way, beginning next week.
via dpreview.com

Mulholland Drive





Some time ago,  I spent a year conceptualizing this very simple photograph.
My feeling was to get a sensation for David Lynch for someone I thought might appreciated it most.
I went to the location of Mulholland Dr. several times and took endless shots and once with a model but in the end and a year later it was this one that I thought captured his spirit.
Although I don"t believe it was well received or thought of by whom it was intended,
 it is no less special to me.


“A kiss on the forehead”


BY MARINA TSVETAEVA
NEW VERSIONS FROM THE RUSSIAN BY ILYA KAMINSKY AND JEAN VALENTINE

"A kiss on the forehead—erases misery.
I kiss your forehead.
O
A kiss on the eyes—lifts sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.

A kiss on the lips—is a drink of water.


I kiss your lips.

A kiss on the forehead—erases memory."


1917



The Inventory of Goodbye

The Inventory Of Goodbye by Anne Sexton


I have a pack of letters,
I have a pack of memories.
I could cut out the eyes of both.
I could wear them like a patchwork apron.
I could stick them in the washer, the drier,
and maybe some of the pain would float off like dirt?
Perhaps down the disposal I could grind up the loss.
Besides -- what a bargain -- no expensive phone calls.
No lengthy trips on planes in the fog.
No manicky laughter or blessing from an odd-lot priest.
That priest is probably still floating on a fog pillow.
Blessing us. Blessing us.

Am I to bless the lost you,
sitting here with my clumsy soul?
Propaganda time is over.
I sit here on the spike of truth.
No one to hate except the slim fish of memory
that slides in and out of my brain.
No one to hate except the acute feel of my nightgown
brushing my body like a light that has gone out.
It recalls the kiss we invented, tongues like poems,
meeting, returning, inviting, causing a fever of need.
Laughter, maps, cassettes, touch singing its path -
all to be broken and laid away in a tight strongbox.
The monotonous dead clog me up and there is only
black done in black that oozes from the strongbox.
I must disembowel it and then set the heart, the legs,
of two who were one upon a large woodpile
and ignite, as I was once ignited, and let it whirl
into flame, reaching the sky
making it dangerous with its red.

Photograph by Sarah Moon


sorrows

Photobucket Pictures, Images and Photos
Photograph by Dirk Braeckman

sorrows
BY LUCILLE CLIFTON
who would believe them winged
who would believe they could be

beautiful who would believe
they could fall so in love with mortals

that they would attach themselves
as scars attach and ride the skin


sometimes we hear them in our dreams
rattling their skulls clicking their bony fingers

envying our crackling hair
our spice filled flesh


they have heard me beseeching
as I whispered into my own

cupped hands enough not me again
enough but who can distinguish

one human voice
amid such choruses of desire

Survivor

Guiding in the Air Currents

Shining, piercing through, luxuriant as always
near the byways of permanence, flowing as always
above the sapient highway. In the sky, piercing through,
logical in the strange dimensions of materiality
here the metagyres in the cerulean, near the planar edge

M Courtney Soper

Meeting at an Airport

Photobucket Pictures, Images and Photos
Lillian Bassman



Meeting at an Airport

BY TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI
You asked me once,
on our way back
from the midmorning
trip to the spring:
“What do you hate,
and who do you love?”
And I answered,
from behind the eyelashes
of my surprise,
my blood rushing
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure . . .
I love the spring
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”
And you laughed . . .
and the almond tree blossomed
and the thicket grew loud with nightingales.
. . . A question
now four decades old:
I salute that question’s answer;
and an answer
as old as your departure;
I salute that answer’s question . . .
And today,
it’s preposterous,
here we are at a friendly airport
by the slimmest of chances,
and we meet.
Ah, Lord!
we meet.
And here you are
asking—again,
it’s absolutely preposterous—
I recognized you
but you didn’t recognize me.
“Is it you?!”
But you wouldn’t believe it.
And suddenly
you burst out and asked:
“If you’re really you,
What do you hate
and who do you love?!”
And I answered—
my blood
fleeing the hall,
rushing in me
like the shadow
cast by a cloud of starlings:
“I hate departure,
and I love the spring,
and the path to the spring,
and I worship the middle
hours of morning.”
And you wept,
and flowers bowed their heads,
and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.
Taha Muhammah Ali, “Meeting at an Airport” from So What. Copyright © 2006 by Taha Muhammah Ali. Reprinted by permission of Copper Canyon Press.


Source: So What (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)


from the deep end of the ocean

they can cut and shred your body till that person in the mirror is someone you no longer recognize.

it's that light inside,
that light that draws us in,

they can never touch that,
it belongs to you and it's where true beauty lives really.