petites bêtises: February 2011

Monday, February 28, 2011

Sunday, February 27, 2011

When on a summer's day the butterfly
settles on the flower and, wings
closed, sways with it in the
meadow-breeze ....

All our heart's courage is the
echoing response to the
first call of being which
gathers our thinking into
the play of the world.

In thinking all things
become solitary and slow.

Patience nurtures magnanimity.

He who thinks greatly must
err greatly.

today's 10

1. a purring siamese on my lap
2. crepes
3. hiding my tears as you close your door
4. the traces of memory in a shell
5. lemons in the sunshine
6. a too big t-shirt slipping off my shoulder
7. red wine
8. ravishing red lipstick
9. the feeling of your little hand in mine
10. the middle east

light

via Lolita blog

to dream by

Radiant and Dazzling

by Todd Colby

I want something really vast and soft
and radiant and dazzling to lift you into
the day so that you feel a real sense of panic
start to recede. There will be gorgeous spiders
and bits of blue skin and something really
sweet like peach pie and honey and pomegranate
jam and stuff like that. Huge flakes of snow
won't piss you off like they do me when you
walk in the field in Prospect Park someone
is there won't you watch them watch you
walk to me? I can't control what you do
in your free time but I can make a helpful
suggestion or three. Won't all the days you thought
would never end finally end and become
planted in your memory as calm shivers? A shark never
stops moving, not even for you, so why should
you stop getting jacked up before bed, if not for me?
The city is all moist and expectant
like my hand on your cheek as you sleep,
I certainly hope so.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

To Lou Andreas-Salome by Rainer Maria Rilke

I held myself too open, I forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from the lives' roundedness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that I
with all I did incessantly crammed
looks into myself; looks, opinion, curiosity.
Who knows: perhaps eyes form in space
and look on everywhere. Ah, only plunged toward you
does my face cease being on display, grows
into you and twines on darkly, endlessly,
into your sheltered heart.

As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in-breath-
no: as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,
wants to stream, I held you to me: I saw you
turn red from me. How could anyone express
what took place between us? We made up for everything
there was never time for. I matured strangely
in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, had wildest childhood over my heart.

Memory won't suffice here: from those moments
there must be layers of pure existence
on my being's floor, a precipitate
from that immensely overfilled solution.

For I don't think back; all that I am
stirs me because of you. I don't invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you've gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when,
for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

today's 10

1. the joy waking up next to my daughter's beautiful face
2. house sitting
3. afternoon nap in the sun with Heidegger
4. brian eno
5. tea, salad and goat cheese
6. farm tables
7. working from home
8. remembering your soft hair in my hands
9. big sweaters
10. being alone

L'heure exquise

how to be alone

merci Kai....

Monday, February 14, 2011

“Grown-Ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupery