those boxes we all have

heart: rave on

[praial]

Iceland: Landmannalaugar, Suðurland

[20aliens-deactivated20200625]

USA. NYC. Winter night in a bar. 1985 Ferdinando Scianna

[dennybitte]

how long will nature endure?

by Denny Bitte

[blueblackdream]

Andrew Moore, Golden Valley Norwegian Lutheran Church, Perkins County, South Dakota, 2013

[heteroglossia]

I rinse my cup. Do I pay enough attention to living? (Helen Elliot)

[fluttering-slips]

Under the Stars

When my mother died I was as far away as I could be, on an arm of land floating in the Atlantic where boys walk shirtless down the avenue holding hands, and gulls sleep on the battered pilings, their bright beaks hidden beneath one white wing.

Maricopa, Arizona. Mea Culpa. I did not fly to see your body and instead stepped out on a balcony in my slip to watch the stars turn on their grinding wheel. Early August, the ocean, a salt-tinged breeze.

Botanists use the word serotinous to describe late-blossoming, serotinal for the season of late-summer. I did not write your obituary as my sister requested, could not compose such final lines: I closed the piano to keep the music in. Instead

I stood with you on what now seems like the ancient deck of a great ship, our nightgowns flaring, the smell of dying lilacs drifting up from someone’s untended yard, and we listened to the stars hiss into the bent horizon, blossoms the sea gathered tenderly, each shattered and singular one long dead, but even so, incandescent, making a singed sound, singing as they went.

Dorianne Laux

[thunderstruck9]

[mythologyofblue]

Yayoi Kusama, The Sea in the Evening Glow (Facing the Imminent Death), 1988

[mythologyofblue]

Firebugs flare And vanish. I am trying to let go of something. My heart cluttered with names that mean nothing.

-Tracy K. Smith, excerpt from “Interrogative” from Duende

[iamjapanese]

[mythologyofblue]

Ivan Marchuk (via iamjapanese) +

[nemophilies-deactivated20190428]

Mikhail Nesterov, The Nightingale Is Singing

[apoemaday]

XVII

by Adrienne Rich

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love. Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and death. No poison cup, no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder not merely played but should have listened to us, and could instruct those after us: this we were, this is how we tried to love, and these are the forces they had ranged against us, and theses are the forces we had ranged within us, within us and against us, against us and within us.

[arsarteetlabore]

Kissing Her on the Grass (1900) by Wojciech Weiss

[daniela-jacobs]

R’s sneaky shot of me, admiring the sea

(isla grande, colombia;  last month)

[waiataaroha-deactivated20200524]

[elisabeth-reidy]

“Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do, and that’s not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again. So even though it sometimes feels as if one could just about die from disappointment I must concede that in fact in a rather perverse way it is precisely those things I did not get that are keeping me alive.”

— Claire-Louise Bennett, “The Deepest Sea” in Pond

[seinfeldtv]

And you want to be my latex salesman.

[flowerytale]