7.19 a.m. the morning air cool after night rain … sounds are crystalline … traffic, a barbet … drongos, brain fever bird … a bulbul, pale-billed flowerpecker

My brevity has no chains. All intertwined. Given back to the air. Like a reddened road across the rock. A fleeing animal. The depth of impatience and vertical patience fused. -René Char, from “We Are Falling” (tr. Nancy Kline)

Prentiss Moore

Five windows light the cavern’d Man -Wm Blake

In the swoop of the swallow, a storm builds, a garden forms. -René Char (tr. Mary Ann Caws)

An ancient stone watchtower deep within the remote, wild shores of the Gulf of Teulada, in southern Sardinia. Photo by Finn O'Hanlon.

Nomadic spark dying in its fire. -René Char (tr. Nancy Kline)

7.30 p.m. thunder, rain … no electricity … in the dark: lightning … we glimpse houses, fields

Our world, like an archipelago, offers you, after pain and disaster, strawberries it brings back from the countries of death, as well as its fingers warm from having sought them. -René Char (tr. Mary Ann Caws)

beyond the sight of shore, don’t put your trust in the sea, but in the wind. (after Char)

in our immediate experience, the present is the primal.

7 a.m. fever gone … under a clear sky I step outside, walk the path by my neighbor’s small lotus pond … pigeons on the roof … a spider suspended midair … call of a hawk-cuckoo & a white-cheeked barbet

Arthur Sze, Comet Hyakutake

Prentiss Moore

Paul Strand / Pigeon House, Al-‘Adwah, Upper Egypt

Graciela Iturbide / Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, México

This world is a puppet show he said, that lasts only an hour

Graciela Iturbide / Cordero de Dios, La Mixteca, Oaxaca, México

www.youtube.com/watch?v=litu... thanks to @herbert-pfostl.bsky.social

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNWh... thanks to @herbert-pfostl.bsky.social

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQLL... thanks to @herbert-pfostl.bsky.social

Karin Lessing, from A Winter’s Dream Journal, January 1984

The day unfolds and wilts in the heat. I lie here listening to music and reading by window light. You can read my thoughts here.

Emmet Gowin / Edith with Mud Wasp Nests, Danville, Virginia

the reedbeds fill with secrets only the breezes know 20.II.26

Graciela Iturbide / México

Graciela Iturbide / Bomarzo, Italia

Graciela Iturbide / Roma

Suddenly I recall a place near a well set in such a way the stone bench surrounding it invited you to be quiet…. -Rainer Maria Rilke, from his French fragments (tr. A. Poulin, Jr.)

Prentiss Moore

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHwy... thanks to @herbert-pfostl.bsky.social

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXE3... thanks to @herbert-pfostl.bsky.social

www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1Ty... thanks to @herbert-pfostl.bsky.social

I’d lie awake at night, no oil in the lamp, waiting for a flash of lightning to look for the water jug. -Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, from “Ghalib, a Diary: Delhi 1857-1858”

Dorothea Lange / Nile Delta, 1963

Dorothea Lange / Egypt, 1963

I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert. I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top. -Psalm 102

Dorothea Lange / Bananas, Indonesia, 1958

Dorothea Lange / Indonesia, 1958

(illness) Lying in bed, I drift from book to book, waking to sleep, day to night.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwnF... thanks to @herbert-pfostl.bsky.social

Prentiss Moore

1 p.m. The sweepers wash their tiffins at the tap behind our house. Afterwards, they sit by the well and gossip. There’s an old woman they call ‘Chechi’. She’s also the best worker.

“The mind has no edge, but the folds of the brain afford both the maximum surface for touch and the possibility to fall between them inexorably like the sequence of seasons.” — Friederike Mayröcker (quoted in Waldrop, Dissonance)

At least let it be a dilapidated chapel with a humble roof and a decaying door. . . . ("Roads Leading Nowhere") -Rainer Maria Rilke, from his French fragments (tr. A. Poulin, Jr.) for György Kurtág

György Kurtág devant le Jardin des Délices de Bosch, Musée de Budapest, 2022

Prentiss Moore

abed today with a cold (maybe flu) / signed my name to this picture of things on the desk (the Mehrotra books arrived at noon, a bit of good fortune)