dogwood

Noisetone

        Each artist embarks on a personal search.
             An artist may take introspective refreshment from green.

Or so they say in Barcelona when air is dry.
        In our country it is a water sprinkler that hints, "rinsed green."
                     Colors often break themselves into separate hues

        of noisetone.                  In a Barcelona cabaret when green is overtaken,
it is stirred into the mint color of drink.

       The spirit is lifted among primary colors. Nine rows of color.
                              The future writ in white spaces.

-- Barbara Guest

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest

nest

at heart the same

a medley of scattered fragments—one so calm and shy, almost detached and as if philosophical, the other so urgent, anxious, imploring—were nevertheless the same prayer, bursting forth like different inner sunrises, and merely refracted through the different mediums of other thoughts, of artistic researches carried on through the years in which he had sought to create something new. A prayer, a hope which was at heart the same, distinguishable beneath these disguises in the various works of Viteuil.

-- Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time
Tr. Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright

dawn|cherry blossoms

untitled

Half Moon, Small Cloud

Caught out in daylight, a rabbit's
transparent pallor, the moon
is paired with a cloud of equal weight:
the heavenly congruence startles.

For what is the moon, that it haunts us,
this impudent companion immigrated
from the system's less fortunate margins,
the realm of dust collected in orbs?

We grow up as children with it, a nursemaid
of a bonneted sort, round-faced and kind,
not burning too close like parents, or too far
to spare even a glance, like movie stars.

No star but in the zodiac of stars,
a stranger there, too big, it begs for love
(the man in it) and yet is diaphanous,
its thereness as mysterious as ours.

-- John Updike

Listen to a reading of this poem by Charles McGrath (link)