Longing - Czesław Miłosz
Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.
Marfa, Texas came up in conversation on Saturday and I am now remembering our February 2013 visit and how we hid a NYC MetroCard (with some unused fares) atop a window frame in the courthouse tower for some poetry-loving friends to find when they were to be there the week or two after we were, heading the opposite direction across the country. The card was one of the Poetry in Motion cards with Aracelis Girmay’s “Noche de Lluvia, San Salvador” and it looked like the one above that I cropped from a photo on this eBay listing. Unbeknownst to us, a proposal was in their plans.
Here’s is the text of the poem as an alt-text to the image above:
Noche de Lluvia, San Salvador Aracelis Girmay, b. 1977
Rain who nails the earth, whose infinite legs nail the earth, whose silver faces touch my faces, I marry you. & open all the windows of my house to hear your million feral versions of si si
sí
si si
High speed rail trains at Wuhan railway station in China
“Her house is a place where I am learning to look at things, where I am learning how to belong in space. In rooms full of objects, crowded with things, I am learning to recognize myself. She hands me a mirror, showing me how to look. The color of wine she has made in my cup, the beauty of the everyday. Surrounded by fields of tobacco, the leaves braided like hair, dried and hung, circles and circles of smoke fill the air. We string red peppers fiery hot, with thread that will not be seen. They will hang in front of a lace curtain to catch the sun. Look, she tells me, what the light does to color!”
—bell hooks, describing her grandmother’s house, as quoted by Elleza Kelley in her review of Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes
Egyptian/Phoenician Glass Dog Head Bead, 6th-4th Century BC
“This is not a process of self- or world-transcendence, but one of self- and world-creation.”
—Stephen Batchelor, “Buddhism Without Beliefs” (1997)
Voces y formas para Chile. Poemas ilustrados para el pueblo chileno, Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC), Buenos Aires, 1973 [The CAyC Files, International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX + Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York, NY]
Source: icaa.mfah.org
Orpheus in Spring - Jenny George
“Orpheus in Spring” by Jenny George
Some people collect dirt from significant places. Or spoonfuls of cloudy ocean inside jars. Like amateur naturalists, they keep these treasures permanently on a shelf. Of course an amateur is simply a person who loves, who brings love to bear on a particular subject. Returning from one trip I failed to bring back a jar of anything. I stood outside my house where white stitches of snow were dissolving into the ground beneath the evergreens. An unset moon floated over the trees. If I stand very still, I do no further harm. I am a tiny theater of non-harming. My breath watches raptly. Sees how everything is still alive.
Kunizo Matsumoto, Untitled, (ink and collage on paper), 2014 [Christian Berst – Art Brut, Paris. © Kunizo Matsumoto]
Source: christianberst.com
1865 US Coast Survey sketch for the SF Bay area
A carnelian frog amulet. From Egypt, ca. 1540-1296 BCE, now housed at the Cleveland Museum of Art
Where the streets meet the trails. These are the trails to streets scattered throughout San Francisco, and why I love riding here.
(via Lukas)
“Using vintage gas station maps as a base, I add 66 meters of sea level rise, the highest predicted by the IPCC if all the ice sheets melt” – Jeffrey Linn