Incomplete Graces

Words. Style. Flowers. Home. A database of inspirations.

[feral-ballad]

Kayleb Rae Candrilli, from Water I Won’t Touch; “My partner wants me to write them a poem about Sheryl Crow”

[anitanh]

[inkpressedpetals]

[weltenwellen]

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back,”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

[danskjavlarna]

Source details and larger version.

All sorts of vintage book imagery is here in my virtual stacks.

[grrlmusic]

Opening Ceremony

[dk-thrive]

Go back in time.  Examine the babe when still in its mother's arms.  See the external world reflected for the first time in the still-dark mirror of his intelligence.  Contemplate the first models to make an impression on him.  Listen to the words that first awaken his dormant powers of thought.  Take note, finally, of the first battles he is obliged to fight.  Only then will you understand where the prejudices, habits, and passions that will dominate his life come from.  In a manner of speaking, the whole man already lies swaddled in his cradle.

— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Gosselin, January 1835 & April 1840)

[derangedrhythms]

For many an hour I strayed through the maze of the forest, turning now to right and now to left, pacing slowly down long alleys of undergrowth, shadowy and chill, even under the mid-day sun, and halting beneath great oaks; lying on the short turf of a clearing where the faint sweet scent of wild roses came to me on the wind and mixed with the heavy perfume of the elder whose mingled odour is like the odour of the room of the dead, a vapour of incense and corruption. 

Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan

[henk-heijmans]

The tree of life, 2024 - by Skander Khlif (1983), Tunisian/German

[mortalpractice]

& how when we left there was a white-haired lady, funny in the parking lot, feeding pigeons with the bread from her fanny pack, in front of a big truck she paid no attention to though it was waiting for her to move & my eyes caught a flood & I turned looking for someone who would understand I’d just seen my angel throwing bread down to the pigeons just kindly, slowly. & you, without my saying a thing, as if you heard the chest its joy & cardinal, you said yeah, just that. How marvelous. Ordinary. To get to see & turn around, & know somebody else was seeing, too. One day it will be otherwise. I always meant to thank you for that. Thank you. What is close to my heart is that woman, that city, you, that noon on the dry land dressed in pigeons & daylight, the dry land dressed in our brief lives, our lives brief & miraculous, as the bees.

— Aracelis Girmay, from “Central City Senior Center, New Orleans,” Kingdom Animalia

[aguard1ente]

Lunch Poems / Frank O’Hara

—St Paul and all that

[toyastales]

Meyle & Mayer snake brooch, c. 1900, crafted from silver, enamel, and opal.

[morphic-mythos]

The Greek for “divine possession” is enthusiasmos—enthusiasm. To be enthused or enthusiastic is to be “engodded,” to be divinely inspired.

—Stephen Fry, Mythos

[milksockets]

'this necklace designed by louis comfort tiffany, c. 1910, is made of favrile glass beetles set in gold' in the jeweled menagerie: the world of animals in gems - suzanne tennenbaum + janet zapata (2001)

[askebos]

“Stop thinking about saving your fragile face. Tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp. We will not blame you if your words go down in flames and nothing is left but the raw-scald. We will not blame you if, with the reticence of a surgeon’s hands, your words suture only the red places where blood might flow. We will not blame you because we know you can never do it properly: once and for all. Passion is never enough. Talent is never enough. Skill is never enough. But try. For our sake and yours. So. Forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul. You, so blessed with occasional blindness, can speak the language that tells us what only language can: how to see without pictures. We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

— Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993

[the1920sinpictures]

1920s Cartier The Dunn Necklace is composed of five rows of graduated natural pearls with a fabulous diamond, pearl and platinum clasp. It is made of 339 natural pearls and was donated to the Smithsonian Institute in 1977. From Art Deco, Avant Garde and Modernism, FB.

[neuro-lab]