tuesday

"Tea rose- the only one in the neighborhood"

in the face

something added - as if by the wind:

seconds of trembling in it

seem the body - of calixity:

in the temples - seems the weight of folds

rounded and gentle: with sorrow

26 June 1983

Gennady Aygi

monday

"The Garden"
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.

She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

Ezra Pound

saturday

"The deaf and the blind"
Will we reach the sea if bells are shells
In our pockets, if the sea is crashing
In the sea, or will we rather be
The bearers of a purer, stiller water?

When water chafes its hands, it sharpens knives.
Warriors have found their weapons in the waves
And the clashing of their blows is like
Rocks wrecking ships at night.

It is thunder, it is tempest. Why not the silence
Of the flood? For in us is the space we've dreamed
To hold the deepest silence and we breathe
Like the wind on the tremendous seas, the wind

That slowly crawls over all the horizons.
-Paul Èluard

thursday

"Sequence"
To sleep, with the moon in one eye and the sun in the other,

Love in your mouth, a lovely bird in your hair,

Adorned like the fields, the woods, the routes, the sea,

Around the whole world so lovely and adorned.

Flee across the landscape

Through branches of smoke and all the fruits of the wind,

Stone legs with sand stockings,

Held by the waist, all the river's muscles,

And the last concern on a face transformed.

-Paul Èluard

thursday

"I would like to live on a farm. Not a modern farm, mind you, but a simple old-fashioned farm with cows and pigs and goats and chickens and ducks and horses, where every day is the same except for the seasons bringing a different kind of work. I would have a vegetable garden, and from the kitchen I could look over a wheat field. I would work hard all day long and feed a lot of people, preferably more children than grown-ups. I would have a big, square wood-burning stove with low benches on the side where we would sit in winter and warm our backs. And in summer there would be large copper kettles on the stove with fruit and sugar cooking for hours, the preserve jars lined up on the long kitchen table, and in the fall mushrooms on the stove, freshly picked in the woods nearby. There would be a small river to calmly fish in. The farm should not be too far away from a small village, and I would set my clock by the sound of the evening church bells. I would like to sit on a bench in front of the house when the day's work is ended or lie under an apple tree."

from Marlene Dietrich's ABC

tuesday

"The River" by Paul Eluard

The river I have under my tongue
Unimaginable water, my little boat,
And curtains lowered, let's speak.

sunday

I should like to turn this photograph into a stained glass window.

thursday

What are friends for, my mother asks.
A duty undone, visit missed,
casserole unbaked for sick Jane.
Someone has just made her bitter.

Nothing. They are for nothing, friends,
I think. All they do in the end-
they touch you. They fill you like music.
-Rosellen Brown

wednesday

tuesday

"I watch a lot of films. The cinema has become for me a part of my experience. I cite cinema as if the films I have seen were part of my life and of my experience."

Pedro Almodovar

monday

In my dreams, I write important telegrams in silver needle thread from my clicking Remington that I stuff into books living inside of the libraries I visit after long journeys on a ship similarly stuffed with books. The ship creaks and moans and poets whisper "tread softly, for you tread on my dreams" to the water. In the study, a group of aging scholars organizes the Busby Berkeley Academy of Dreams before pouring over ancient, yellowing encyclopedias. The sea smells of earl grey tea and fields of cotton. I carry land in my pocket, a small marble shovel tied around my neck. The printing press leaks and faces smeared with black ink laugh, eyes blank and budding like white pearls. Children ask questions such as, "Did Franz Kafka ever see Nosferatu?" and we smile despite uncertainties. Home isn't a place, but a feeling; conveyed through words such as: the warmth of a teacup pressed to my cheek, the crackling voice of someone who has disappeared from the earth repeating inside of my crooked ears, the slant of sunlight breaking through a thick of trees to warm one side of the street in the dead silence of winter, and imagining the wind gently pulling apart your strands of hair is a pair of hands.