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"I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections,
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling,
Or just after.”
~ Wallace Stevens~
“I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries,
and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.”
~ Joseph Addison ~
since last march, my dog and i have probably circled the house 1,800 times. but my problems are few. i've lived in the city (that means new york to me) in a studio apartment and worry about those in urban lockdown. just scream and we'll come running.
a once sweet berry farm down the road until the zoning board chopped them off at the knees. all they wanted to do was scones and coffee.
"And death cries quickly, in a flash of voice, Keep you, keep you, I am gone, oh keep you as My memory, is the mother of us all..."
– Wallace Stevens
(If this looks fuzzy, reload. The image is clear, but Flickr has been acting up of late.)
P.S. Initially I had a difficult time posting this image because I didn't have a title. That may sound strange, but some images demand of me titles and/or poetry or music.
Then my Aunt Theodora was admitted to the hospital and suddenly the image had a purpose. She was my late father's last surviving sibling. She passed away yesterday, with family by her side. I visited her in the hospital 2 day's ago and for just a moment, she smiled and winked at me.
The Poems of Our Climate
I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations - one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.
II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.
III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
Wallace Stevens
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...tulips, not carnations. With thanks to Ionushi .
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna;
Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt
The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.
Wallace Stevens, "Peter Quince at the Clavier" (verse I)
to speak quietly at such a distance
in an elemental freedom, sharp and cold
w.stevens, transport to summer
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
~ Wallace Stevens
"Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird."
---Wallace Stevens
Tea at the Palaz of Hoon
Wallace Stevens, 1879 - 1955
Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.
What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?
Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
Another image from a new series inspired by the Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird".
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pinetrees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens
"The Snow Man"
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
~ Wallace Stevens. Sunday Morning II.