“…When I stand up to cry out,
She laughs.
On the window sill, I lean
My bare elbows.
One blue wing, torn whole out of heaven,
Soaks in the black rain.”
Hamilton Leithauser - "Off The Beach"
I am a Sioux Brave, He Said in Minneapolis - James Wright
1.
He is just plain drunk.
He knows no more than I do
What true waters to mourn for
Or what kind of words to sing
When he dies.
2.
The black caterpillar
Crawls out, what with one thing
And another, across
The wet road.
How lonely the dead must be.
Elevation - Henri Cole
Pigs eat the rats that eat the corn,
and we eat the pigs and forget about this.
Life cannot shake off death.
Like a study in genteelness,
you were neatly dressed in a jacket
and trousers. Removing your coffin,
they leant it up against a wall. Things always
start out organized and get messier.
Outside, birds scattered, jip-jip and pip-pip-pip,
as some new version of America became itself.
Each night I dreamed the dream called elevation
in which a wondrous man sought my hand and my heart.
Then I awoke, and he departed.
Look at the flock of pigeons
flying into a thunderhead! I always feel an elevation
when small things overmaster the great.
William Eggleston, from "Los Alamos" (1971 - 1974)
Frank Walter - Untitled (Red Flower On Abstract Land And Sky) - no date
Frank Fairfield - "Short Life of Trouble"
Georges de La Tour - La Femme à la Puce - 1638 (!)
James Salter, from "Cassada"
“…Soon after, there was the uneven ring of the field phone and the first scramble went off, two ships flowing down the runway, fleeing from a roar that washed over the field like a furnace thrown open, making the corrugated walls tremble.
Isbell stood watching as they crossed the trees together, the wheels coming up. An hour of absolution in the clean, holy morning. An hour and a half. How often he had relied upon it himself, a taste of the immaculate with unknown cities far below and in cold silence the first mist vanishing from the hills.”
- James Salter, Cassada
Wet Leg - "Pond Song"
From The Gospel of Matthew
“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear”
- 11:15
Yoshida Homei - "A Peasant Woman" - Japanese, c. 1915
Writing Table with a Brook & Flowers - Japan, 19th Century
Fritz Scholder - "Falling Buffalo" (1973)
Henri Cole - "Doves"
Gray and white, as if with age, or some preserving
of the past, as in Beowulf, our hoary ancestor,
hoary as in a bat or a willow, or the venerable
hoary dove that flew straight into my picture
window today and then lay dead on the front porch.
We buried it—in some distorted version of its normal self—
folded in a white cloth napkin in the backyard.
Still soft enough to be cut into like a cabbage, I thought,
I’m glad I’m not dead. Listen to them now,
higher up in the trees, biting and scratching,
with their unmistakable twitch of life. Don’t fear
nothing, their twittering voices cry. The true spirit
of living isn’t eating greedily, or reflection, or
even love, but dissidence, like an ax of stone.
Leilehua Lanzilotti - "Ko'u Inoa"
