Somewhere between what the eye sees and what the mind thinks is the world

Winter is now all done for sure but a winter state of mind can persist through the year… or as Wallace Stevens so eloquently put: “One must have a mind of winter. To regard the frost and the boughs….”

Poetry for the day:

A poem from the latest issue of Poetry magazine, published each month by the Poetry Foundation. (Subscribe to the magazine here.)

Read the whole poem at the hyperlink below; just posting an excerpt that I loved here!

From On Gardens
by Rick Barot

……Words

that would have meant something
to the friar, walking among the village girls
as though in a field of flowers, knowing
that fucking was one way of   having
a foreign policy. As I write this, there’s snow
falling, which means that every
angry thought is as short-lived as a match.
The night is its own white garden:

snow on the fence, snow on the tree
stump, snow on the azalea bushes,
their leaves hanging down like green

bats from the branches. I know it’s not fair
to see qualities of injustice in the aesthetics
of a garden, but somewhere between
what the eye sees and what the mind thinks
is the world, landscapes mangled

into sentences, one color read into rage.

…..

When the snow stops,

I walk to see the quiet that has colonized

everything. The main street is asleep, except

for the bus that goes by, bright as a cruise ship.

There are sheet cakes of  snow on top

of cars. In front of   houses, each lawn

is as clean as paper, except where the first cat

or raccoon has walked across, each track

like a barbed-wire sash on a white gown.

~*~

Music for the day:

 ~*~

Art for the day:

Some paintings and illustrations today of trees in a winter mood by Eyvind Earle, who I learn was “an American artist, author and illustrator, noted for his contribution to the background illustration and styling of Disney animated films in the 1950s.”

                          

Fir Tree In Snow, 1975                                                                     Snow Covered Bonsai, 1995

                             

Snow Laden, 1996                                                                               Snow Tree, 1995

                           

Snow Trees, 1986                                                                                Red Barn and Tree Snow, 1976

                              

Blue Barn and Snow, 1976                                                                   New Fallen Snow, 1998

The anatomy of summer and the whitened sky

Poem of the day:

Again, I go to Wallace Stevens to start off this week – with an excerpt from a poem called ‘Credences of Summer‘

Postpone the anatomy of summer as
The physical pine, the metaphysical pine.
Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.
Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.

Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
Look at it in its essential barrenness
And say this, this is the centre that I seek.
Fix it in an eternal foliage

And fill the foliage with arrested peace,
Joy of such permanence, right ignorance
Of change still possible. Exile desire
For what is not. This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

Music of the day:

Quintessence Saxophone Quintet plays the 1st part of Vivaldi’s Summer, from the Four Seasons.

 

Art of the day:

Three Trees in Summer by Claude Monet

Source.