be afraid and happy @thecompassgirl - Tumblr Blog

“Everyone is asleep but the sea: knotting, un- knotting the rope of its own approach, squall-racked nerve-running, steepening its crests. Night sea shucks its quivering foil. Secrets spill like shells, like waves under moongold brightwork.”

— Felicity Plunkett, from “Volta do Mar”, A Kinder Sea (via voirlvmer)

virtuallyinsane-autumn

by Wolfgang Hasselmann

arthistoryvault

Venice by John Singer Sargent

apoemaday

What the Dragon Said: a Love Story

by Catherynne M. Valente

So this guy walks into a dragon’s lair and he says why the long tale? HAR HAR BUDDY says the dragon FUCK YOU. The dragon’s a classic the ‘57 Chevy of existential chthonic threats take in those Christmas colors, those impervious green scales, sticky candy-red firebreath, comes standard with a heap of rubylust goldhuddled treasure. Go ahead. Kick the tires, boy. See how she rides. Sit down, kid, says the dragon. Diamonds roll off her back like dandruff. Oh, you’d rather be called a paladin? I’d rather be a unicorn. Always thought that was the better gig. Everyone thinks you’re innocent. Everyone calls you pure. And the girls aren’t afraid they come right up with their little hands out for you to sniff like you’re a puppy and they’re gonna take you home. They let you put your head right in their laps. But nobody on this earth ever got what they wanted. Now I know what you came for. You want my body. To hang it up on a nail over your fireplace. Say to some milk-and-rosewater chica who lays her head in your lap look how much it takes to make me feel like a man. We’re in the dark now, you and me. This is primal shit right here. Grendel, Smaug, St. George. You’ve been called up. This is the big game. You don’t have to make stupid puns. Flash your feathers like your monkey bravado can impress. I saw a T-Rex fight a comet and lose. You’ve got nothing I want. Here’s something I bet you don’t know: every time someone writes a story about a dragon a real dragon dies. Something about seeing and being seen something about mirrors that old tune about how a photograph can take your whole soul. At the end of this poem I’m going to go out like electricity in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it. That last blockbuster took out a whole family of Bhutan thunder dragons living in Latvia the fumes of their cleargas hoard hanging on their beards like blue ghosts. A dragon’s gotta get zen with ephemerality. You want to cut me up? Chickenscratch my leather with butcher’s chalk: cutlets, tenderloin, ribs for the company barbecue, chuck, chops, brisket, roast. I dig it, I do. I want to eat everything, too. When I look at the world I see a table. All those fancy houses, people with degrees, horses and whales, bankers and Buddha statues the Pope, astronauts, panda bears and yes, paladins if you let me swallow you whole I’ll call you whatever you want. Look at it all: waitresses and ice caps and submarines down at the bottom of the heavy lightless saltdark of the sea Don’t they know they’d be safer inside me? I could be big for them I could hold them all My belly could be a city where everyone was so loved they wouldn’t need jobs. I could be the hyperreal post-scarcity dragonhearted singularity. I could eat them and feed them and eat them and feed them. This is why I don’t get to be a unicorn. Those ponies have clotted cream and Chanel No. 5 for blood and they don’t burn up like comets with love that tastes like starving to death. And you, with your standup comedy knightliness, covering Beowulf’s greatest hits on your tin kazoo, you can’t begin to think through what it takes to fill up a body like this. It takes everything pretty and everything true and you stick yourself in a cave because your want is bigger than you. I just want to be the size of a galaxy so I can eat all the stars and gas giants without them noticing and getting upset. Is that so bad? Isn’t that what love looks like? Isn’t that what you want, too? I’ll make you a deal. Come close up stand on my emeraldheart, my sapphireself the goldpile of my body Close enough to smell everything you’ll never be. Don’t finish the poem. Not for nothing is it a snake that eats her tail and means eternity. What’s a few verses worth anyway? Everyone knows poetry doesn’t sell. Don’t you ever feel like you’re just a story someone is telling about someone like you? I get that. I get you. You and me we could fit inside each other. It’s not nihilism if there’s really no point to anything. I have a secret down in the deep of my dark. All those other kids who wanted me to call them paladins, warriors, saints, whose swords had names, whose bodies were perfect as moonlight they’ve set up a township near my liver had babies with the maidens they didn’t save invented electric lightbulbs thought up new holidays. You can have my body just like you wanted. Or you can keep on fighting dragons writing dragons fighting dragons re-staging that same old Cretaceous deathmatch you mammals always win. But hey, hush, come on. Quit now. You’ll never fix that line. I have a forgiveness in me the size of eons and if a dragon’s body is big enough it just looks like the world. Did you know the earth used to have two moons?

magictransistor

Edmund Weiss. Bilderatlas der Sternenwelt (Stellar Atlas). 1888-1892.

#yeah space

catilinas

obsessed

huariqueje

Arrival ‐ Paul Batch , 2020.

American , b. ?

Oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in.

larapaulussen

Really missing my evening walks in my old neighboorhood

thefugitivesaint

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poem 85 from “The Gardener”, 1914 Translated by the author from the original Bengali. New York: The Macmillan Company.

typodescript

[text ID: Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence!

I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.

Open your doors and look abroad.

From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years beffore.

In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years. end ID]

commeunplateau

L’Alfama se réveille. #gif

nubbsgalore

oregon

etherea1ity

Let's run through the medow and never look back

rustycharlesryan-deactivated202

lightning

francisque millet / albert cuyp / john martin / claude joseph vernet / billy solitario / johannes tavenraat / iva morris / willem van de velde le jeune / maxime vorobiov