2666. on shadowless intellectuals:

"They employ rhetoric where they sense a hurricane, they try to be eloquent where they sense fury unleashed, they strive to maintain the discipline of meter where there's only a deafening and hopeless silence. They say cheep cheep, bowwow, meow meow, because they are incapable of imagining an animal of colossal proportions, or the absence of such an animal" (122).

Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think

I think of you
and the continents brilliant and arid
and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air
as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morning
and your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York

see a vast bridge stretching to the humbled outskirts with only you
          standing on the edge of the purple like an only tree

and in Toledo the olive groves' soft blue look at the hills with silver
          like glasses like an old lady's hair
it's well known that God and I don't get along together
it's just a view of the brass works to me, I don't care about the Moors
seen through you the great works of death, you are greater

you are smiling, you are emptying the world so we can be alone

Frank O'Hara

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

- Louis Macneice

Marina Tsvetaeva

Where does this tenderness come from?

Where does this tenderness come from?
These are not the – first curls I
have stroked slowly – and lips I
have known are – darker than yours

as stars rise often and go out again
(where does this tenderness come from?)
so many eyes have risen and died out
in front of these eyes of mine.

and yet no such song have
I heard in the darkness of night before,
(where does this tenderness come from?):
here, on the ribs of the singer.

Where does this tenderness come from?
And what shall I do with it, young
sly singer, just passing by?
Your lashes are – longer than anyone's.

from The Guermantes Way

That she should have also worked, with the perseverance and the ingenuity that came naturally to her, to undo the social status she owed to her high birth does not in any way imply that, even in that remote period of her youth, Mme de Villeparisis did not attach great importance to her position. In the same way, the neurasthenic can contrive the web of isolation and inactivity in which he lives from morning to night without its seeming any more bearable, and as he hastens to add another mesh to the net that holds him captive, it is possible that he is dreaming only of dancing, sport, and travel. We constantly strive to give our life its form, but by copying, in spite of ourselves, like a drawing, the features of the person we are, not the person we should like to be. (181)

yes

i'm still here. i love you all.

Nat King Cole - tea for two

Nina Simone - my baby just cares for me

Yes! No!

- Mary Oliver

How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted trout
lilies are satisfied, standing a few inches above the earth. I
think serenity is not something you just find in the world,
like a plum tree, holding up its white petals.

The violets, along the river, are opening their blue faces, like
small dark lanterns.

The green mosses, being so many, are as good as brawny.

How important it is to walk along, not in haste but slowly,
looking at everything and calling out

Yes! No! The

swan, for all his pomp, his robes of grass and petals, wants
only to be allowed to live on the nameless pond. The catbrier
is without fault. The water thrushes, down among the sloppy
rocks, are going crazy with happiness. Imagination is better
than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless
and proper work.

why do fools fall in love?

further automated correspondence from the internet, to me and a million others

1. It is really beautiful how quickly and well
Drosera and Dionaea dissolve little cubes
of albumen and gelatine.

I kept the same sized cubes on wet moss
for comparison. When you were here
I forgot that I had tried gelatine,

but albumen is far better for watching
its dissolution and absorption. Frankland
has told me how to test in a rough way

for pepsin;

and in the autumn
he will discover

what acid the digestive juice contains.

Ike and Tina Turner

LIKE A BULWARK

Affirmed. Pent by power that holds it fast-
a paradox. Pent. Hard pressed,
you take the blame and are inviolate.
Abased at last?
Not the tempest-tossed.
Compressed; firmed by the thrust of the blast
till compact, like a bulwark against fate;
lead-saluted,
saluted by lead?
As though flying through Old Glory full mast.

- Marianne Moore

i know it, you know it, but really- lean on back and listen well...

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

-- Rilke

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

- ee cummings

The Plaid Dress

Strong sun, that bleach
The curtains of my room, can you not render
Colourless this dress I wear?—
This violent plaid
Of purple angers and red shames; the yellow stripe
Of thin but valid treacheries; the flashy green of kind deeds done
Through indolence high judgments given here in haste;
The recurring checker of the serious breach of taste?

No more uncoloured than unmade,
I fear, can be this garment that I may not doff;
Confession does not strip it off,
To send me homeward eased and bare;

All through the formal, unoffending evening,
  under the clean
Bright hair,
Lining the subtle gown. . . it is not seen,
But it is there.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

joni mitchell

poem from the trash in my inbox

Try...

Warm milk, caffeine-
free herbal
tea, or hot water
with lemon

and honey. These
drinks may help
get your body ready
for rest.

Two suns are cooling

Two suns are cooling - O save me, God!

The first - in heavens, the second - in heart.
Will I have an excuse for that? -
Both suns made me fully mad!
No pain from the beams - they're lost!
Hotter sun will be frozen first.

- MARINA TSVETAEVA