Bluebird

An appetite... shared and otherwise.

Tim Walker

via Kiss me au revoir...

WT Benda - Illustrator & Mask Maker

October 5th 1922

Photograph by Edward Steichen, model wearing mask by WT Benda

 

spied the language of their love

Rabi Kahn - the kiss

moments of territory

late angel by Evgeniy Shaman

Carlo Mollino

Blues for Almost Forgotten Music

"I am trying to remember the lyrics of old songs

                                                            I’ve forgotten, mostly

I am trying to remember one-hit wonders, hymns,

                                              and musicals like West Side Story.

Singing over and over what I can recall, I hum remnants on

                                                             buses and in the car.

 

I am so often alone these days with echoes of these old songs

                                                          and my ghosted lovers.

I am so often alone that I can almost hear it, can almost feel

                                                        the half-touch of others,

can almost taste the licked clean spine of the melody I’ve lost.

 

I remember the records rubbed with static and the needle

                                                                     gathering dust.

I remember the taste of a mouth so sudden and still cold from

                                                                         wintry gusts.

It seemed incredible then — a favorite song, a love found.

                                                                It wasn't, after all.

 

Days later, while vacuuming, the lyrics come without thinking.

Days later, I think I see my old lover in a café but don’t,

                                                                        how pleasing

it was to think it was him, to finally sing that song.

 

This is the way of all amplitude: we need the brightness

                                                                         to die some.

This is the way of love and music: it plays like a god and

                                                                       then is done.

Do I feel better remembering, knowing for certain

                                                                       what’s gone?"

 

By Roxane Beth Johnson

Photography by Sarah Moon.

women staring into vacant dreams

m e t h o d s   o f   i m p e r f e c t i o n  

Drawing using Ulla Trallala texture.

Book Nine

One man prays: How shall I be able to lie with this woman?
      Do thou pray thus: How shall I not desire to lie with her?
      Another prays thus: How shall I be released from this?     
      Another prays: How shall I not desire to be released?
      —Marcus Aurelius

Photo by Chris Keeney.

 

"When we are lost in our longings, Aurelius, already it is too late:

there is already nothing we can do. I have rarely desired an end

to my desires. We are so in love with our wanting. Last week,

though doctors were quick to repair it, a baby in India was born

grasping her own beating heart in her fist. Today, a Dumpster

arrives from Dave’s Trash Removal & I begin to fill it. I toss in

a transistor radio that hasn’t worked in years. A man walking past

asks if he can take it. Later, he returns & carries off a broken TV.

A neighbor salvages the dented gray fuse box; a girl wants a window,

a paper bag full of tangled cords. All night I listen to the wind

& the echoes of feet kicking through rubbish, like a mouse nesting

inside a drum. My older brother is dead a decade. Yet here

in its enormous gold frame is the familiar, pastel portrait

someone named Maxwell drew for our mother, an inaccurate

rendering of the two of us when we were small. I can’t look at it;

I can’t throw it away. Every change is a death, you tell yourself,

turn thy thoughts now to thy life as a child. . . . One day, I tell myself,

I will shut all the doors, leave everything behind. The museum

is showing a hundred tricked-out Victorian photographs

of that other world: the hoax of floating fairies, women haunted

by ghostly blurs. Another century & still we want to believe

in what we know cannot be true. Your words, Aurelius, have found me,

but you could not. If we are disappointed, we have only ourselves

to blame: Wipe out thy imagination. We fill out hands when they are

empty. We empty ourselves when we have held too much too long."

Kathleen Graber, “Book Nine” from The Eternal City. Copyright © 2010 by Kathleen Graber.

traffic jams and radios

sentimental

"They are sitting in the car in a traffic jam,
the radio is on, exhaust fumes
and music, a song he thinks
is beautiful, about
violins on fire and a dance which goes on
until the end of love.
Not the song but what he says
makes her unable to look at him.
Now something else enters the car:
music and exhaust fumes and shyness.
Shyness because the dance
until the end of love is much too much
stretches too far into the past,
too far ahead, his soul
swells suddenly unprotected, so unprotected,
she only says: 'Sentimental'.
Yes he says, sentimental.
She will never know if he knew
how she seized upon that word.
He will never know what she
understood, how far and far,
she will never know that he
understood that she understood
what suddenly came over him, unless
someone, an historian perhaps,
later exactly reconstructs the way it used to go
with people in traffic jams with radios."

- Judith Herzberg


© Translation Rina Vergano

Alix Malka - Photographer

The Meeting of the Waters

 

By Thomas Moore

There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet
As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet;
Oh! the last rays of feeling and life must depart,
Ere the bloom of that valley shall fade from my heart. 

Yet it was not that nature had shed o'er the scene
Her purest of crystal and brightest of green;
'Twas not her soft magic of streamlet or hill,
Oh! no, -- it was something more exquisite still. 

'Twas that friends, the beloved of my bosom, were near,
Who made every dear scene of enchantment more dear,
And who felt how the best charms of nature improve,
When we see them reflected from looks that we love.

Sweet vale of Avoca! how calm could I rest
In thy bosom of shade, with the friends I love best,
Where the storms that we feel in this cold world should cease,
And our hearts, like thy waters, be mingled in peace. 

Photography by Alix Malka and text by Thomas Moore.
I highly recommend you click on the photos to see them large.

moments

Not about

                              you

          not about

                              her

          it's about

a moment

and a

bit

of

me

*

white rain

Thanks to Lis for the video.

a bit of a man to man chat

Letter to a Friend about Girls

by Philip Larkin 

After comparing lives with you for years

I see how I’ve been losing: all the while

I’ve met a different gauge of girl from yours.

Grant that, and all the rest makes sense as well:

My mortification at your pushovers,

Your mystification at my fecklessness—

Everything proves we play in separate leagues.

Before, I couldn’t credit your intrigues

Because I thought all girls the same, but yes,

You bag real birds, though they’re from alien covers. 

 

 

Now I believe your staggering skirmishes

In train, tutorial and telephone booth,

The wife whose husband watched away matches

While she behaved so badly in a bath,

And all the rest who beckon from that world

Described on Sundays only, where to want

Is straightway to be wanted, seek to find,

And no one gets upset or seems to mind

At what you say to them, or what you don’t:

A world where all the nonsense is annulled,

And beauty is accepted slang for yes.

But equally, haven’t you noticed mine?

They have their world, not much compared with yours,

But where they work, and age, and put off men

By being unattractive, or too shy,

Or having morals—anyhow, none give in:

Some of them go quite rigid with disgust

At anything but marriage: that’s all lust

And so not worth considering; they begin

Fetching your hat, so that you have to lie 

 

 

 

Till everything’s confused: you mine away

For months, both of you, till the collapse comes

Into remorse, tears, and wondering why

You ever start such boring barren games

—But there, don’t mind my saeva indignatio:

I’m happier now I’ve got things clear, although

It’s strange we never meet each other’s sort:

There should be equal chances, I’d’ve thought.

Must finish now. One day perhaps I’ll know

What makes you be so lucky in your ratio

—One of those ‘more things’, could it be? Horatio.

 

 

 

Text by Philip Larkin and photography by Wingate Paine.

being and nothingness