Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile – the winds –
To a heart in port –
Done with the compass –
Done with the chart!
Rowing in Eden –
Ah, the sea!
Might I moor – Tonight –
In thee!
Wild Nights—Wild Nights! (249), Emily Dickinson
Derek Guy on pantalones chinos.
« Quand une personne a vraiment atteint la capacité de créer, son unique devoir est de manifester cette puissance à l’écart des attentes et des jugements. » (Forough Farrokhzâd (1935-1967))
via Librarie Petite Egypte
Perhaps life is a choked moment where my gaze
annihilates itself inside in the pupils of your eyes—
?????I will mingle that sensation with my grasp
?????of the moon and comprehension of darkness.In a room the size of loneliness,
my heart’s the size of love.
It contemplates its simple pretexts for happiness:
the beauty of the flowers’ wilting in a vase,the sapling you planted in our garden,
Reborn, Forugh Farrokhzad. Translated By Sholeh Wolpé
and the canaries’ song—the size of a window.
Behind his project lay the understanding that social life is “a seamless web, a single inconceivable and transindividual process, in which there is no need to invent ways of linking language events and social upheavals or economic contradictions because on that level they were never separate from one another” Benjamin Kunkel on Fredric Jameson.
Lee Friedlander, Life Still. (Aperture)
Six Photographers on Lee Friedlander’s Timeless Influence.
No one really dies in the myths.
No world is lost in the stories.
Everything is lost in the retelling,
in being wondered at. We grow up
and grow old in our land of grass
and blood moons, births and goneness.
We live our myth in the recurrence,
pretending we will return another day.
Like the morning coming every morning.
The truth is we come back as a choir.
Otherwise Eurydice would be forever
in the dark. Our singing brings her
back. Our dying keeps her alive.
The Singers Change, the Music Goes On, Linda Gregg
What things are steadfast? Not the birds.
Not the bride and groom who hurry
in their brevity to reach one another.
The stars do not blow away as we do.
The heavenly things ignite and freeze.
But not as my hair falls before you.
Fragile and momentary, we continue.
Fearing madness in all things huge
and their requiring. Managing as thin light
on water. Managing only greetings
and farewells. We love a little, as the mice
huddle, as the goat leans against my hand.
As the lovers quickening, riding time.
Making safety in the moment. This touching
home goes far. This fishing in the air.
We Manage Most When We Manage Small, Linda Gregg
What am I if not what happens
when I try to run away?
Water falls out of me like
an opinion. I’m like a screen
door banging between two rivers.
Dear air, what’s inside me
you’re so desperate to take?
I put on the Atlantic like a sweater.
My head bobs on the surface
of a lake I’m named after.
Where do I belong?
My head asks. My body,
exasperated, answers.
Ode on Humidity, P. Scott Cunningham (Poetry, April 2026)
Tomorrow’s Wind, 1991. Public Art Fund — Doris C. Freedman Plaza, February 17 – May 31, 1991.
Thomas Jefferson Park. Materialism.nyc.
Before Words,” 1990. Public Art Fund — Brighter Days at DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, June 1, 2022 – April 30, 2023.
A lane of Yellow led the eye
Unto a Purple Wood
Whose soft inhabitants to be
Surpasses solitude
If Bird the silence contradict
Or flower presume to show
In that low summer of the West
Impossible to know -
Emily Dickinson
Through the young and awkward hours
my lady perfectly moving,
through the new world scarce astir
my fragile lady wandering
in whose perishable poise
is the mystery of Spring
(with her beauty more than snow
dexterous and fugitive
my very frail lady drifting
distinctly, moving like a myth
in the uncertain morning, with
April feet like sudden flowers
From “Puella Mea” [Through the young and awkward hours], E. E. Cummings
‘… where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, […], who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”
“Even as ornament, flowers represent life itself, as fertility, mortality, transience, extravagance, and as such they enter our art, rites, and language.” – Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses.