“The way of love is not
a subtle argument.
The door there
is devastation.
Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom.
How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings.”
Rumi
Photography
You Will Remember
– Pablo Neruda
You will remember that leaping stream
where sweet aromas rose and trembled,
and sometimes a bird, wearing water
and slowness, its winter feathers.
You will remember those gifts from the earth:
indelible scents, gold clay,
weeds in the thicket and crazy roots,
magical thorns like swords.
You’ll remember the bouquet you picked,
shadows and silent water,
bouquet like a foam-covered stone.
That time was like never, and like always.
So we go there, where nothing is waiting;
we find everything waiting there.
Taken through glass, someone’s shoe reflection and below a bird’s awkward pose.
“Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.” ― Alain Badiou
The Lost Hotels of Paris
(excerpt) by Jack Gilbert
Ginsberg came to my house one afternoon
and said he was giving up poetry
because it told lies, that language distorts.
I agreed, but asked what we have
that gets it right even that much.
We look up at the stars and they are
not there. We see the memory
of when they were, once upon a time.
And that too is more than enough.
Upheld by the simplicities of pleasure,
they gain the light, they formlessly entwine;
and radiant beyond your widest measure
they fall among the voices and the wine.
Leonard Cohen
“Dear Lord/ Lest I continue/ My complacent way/ Help me to remember
Somehow out there/ A man died for me today./ As long as there be war
I then must/ Ask and answer/ Am I worth dying for?”
A poem Eleanor Roosevelt kept in her wallet during WWII.
What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Love is the kiss
in the quiet nest
while the leaves are trembling,
mirrored in the water.
Federico García Lorca – The Butterfly’s Evil Spell
Maverick Mist 