7 a.m. this morning’s songbirds: red -vented bulbul, oriental magpie-robin, white-cheeked barbet

from A.K. Ramanujan’s magnificent <Poems of Love and War>

Look only once as the wave casts anchor in the sea. -René Char (tr. Mary Ann Caws)

Arthur Sze

Semi-washout of a Sunday. Shoveled a couple inches of late snow. Pestered, irrefragably, and to little avail, some lines of the long poem. Read another swatch of Krasznahorkai’s _Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming_ (2019). Fossicked again through Wright’s _Buffalo Yoga_ (2004). Two short pieces thereof:

Egon Schiele / Still Life with Books (The Artist’s Desk), 1914-16 for @herbert-pfostl.bsky.social

There'll always be a drop of water lasting longer than the sun without shaking the sun's ascendency. -René Char (tr. Mary Ann Caws)

I've always liked this passage from A.K. Ramanujan's Hymns for the Drowning: "The poem stops because poets are human, because they are mortal, because it is 3 a.m. But the poem goes on."

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

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