(Source: quietlynonlinear, via tatteredcover)
The Elephant and the Butterfly
And then the elephant kissed the butterfly very gently and the butterfly said: “Why didn’t you ever before come down into the valley where I live?” And the elephant answered, “Because I did nothing all day. But now that I know where you live, I’m coming down the curling road to see you every day, if I may—and may I come?” Then the butterfly kissed the elephant and said: “I love you, so please do.”
And every day after this the elephant would come down the curling road which smelled so beautifully (past the seven trees and the bird singing in the bush) to visit his little friend the butterfly.
And they loved each other always.
—e.e. eummings (vialunardimension)
Skeleton leaves, so pretty but too delicate
not strong enough to publish.”
—
Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s rationale of the merits and instabilities he saw in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, those “blossoms” he would not publish during her lifetime.
In 1886, he would join Mabel Loomis Todd in editing and publishing Dickinson’s work posthumously.
Skeleton blooms
Breathtaking X-rays of flowers by photographer Brendan Fitzpatrick, reminiscent of Nick Veasey’s X-ray art.
“… this is the order of forgetting, the one you already know by heart;
it is neither evil nor good, as things are neither here nor there when they fly”
-Susan Stewart “The Flight”
Birds in flight: http://weheartit.com/entry/18664219
Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (June 1937), rendered in 3D
-Lena Gieseke
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
—
If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1923)
-Gertrude Stein
In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode. The reading of a poem, a poetry reading, is not a spectacle, nor can it be passively received. It’s an exchange of electrical currents through language, that daily, mundane, abused, and ill-prized medium, that instrument of deception and revelation, that material thing, that knife, rag, boat, spoon/reed become pipe/tree trunk become drum/mud become clay flute/conch shell become summons to freedom/old trousers and petticoats become iconography in appliqué/rubber bands stretched around a box become lyre.
—Adrienne Rich, Someone is Writing a Poem (via wwnorton)
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” -Wallace Stevens
I.
Among twenty snowy mountains
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II.
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III.
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV.
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling,
Or just after.
VI.
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII.
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
of the women about you?
VIII.
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX.
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X.
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying on a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI.
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII.
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII.
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
