The Shattered Notes

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), poem 85 from “The Gardener”, 1914 Translated by the author from the original Bengali. New York: The Macmillan Company.

[text ID: Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence!

I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.

Open your doors and look abroad.

From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years beffore.

In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years. end ID]

(For most of my life, I have only pretended to acknowledge the claims of so-called common sense. I could never accept, for example, that my mind is a creation, much less a function, of my brain.)

– Gerald Murnane, Border Districts

Biosphere - "Poa Alpina" from Substrata (1997)

Theodore Roethke, from "Vernal Sentiment", The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke [ID'd]

— Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant

José Saramago, Cain (tr. Margaret Jull Costa)

Roland Barthes, Mythologies (tr. Annette Lavers)

I remember,

That dawn in the mist...

Maybe I was awake and.... dreaming.

— Angela Carter, from Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories; “Black Venus”

— Conrad Aiken, from “Sonata in Pathos,“ in Nocturne of Remembered Spring and Other Poems

— John Ashbery, from “Proximity”, Wakefulness: Poems

Joan Didion, 7000 Romaine, Los Angeles, 1967, in: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Anna Kamienska, from “Industrious Amazement: A Notebook,” translated by Clare Cavanagh in Poetry (March 1st, 2011)

Juan Ramón Jiménez,  from “LOVE,”  in Selected Writings of Juan Ramón Jiménez (translated by  Hoffman Reynolds Hays)

A very old apple tree. I created a panorama with a wide open Samyang MF 135mm 135 2.0 lens , That is how I have created a shallow depth of field in this photo. Sweden, Uppsala.

PWS special - Peace

PWS - Margaret

— Louise Glück, from Vita Nova; “The Open Grave”