shining wings

in a life defined by moments - using the selective filter of hindsight - it appears to be arranged with some precision like a string of pearls.

a string of pearls comprised of moments that represent choices - and not the binary choices of childhood in which the present moving towards the future is defined by either/or, right/wrong, good or bad but the full spectrum of choices, the grey scale, the circle.

imagine the circle becoming a limitless space.
timeless.
without definition.

a space.

the long and full present moment.

how would you choose to fill it?

with what quality would you live your life if instead of recognizing the quality of a moment as a transitory thing in which you could do either the right thing or the wrong thing, what if you could see instead a fathomless formless space into which all these moments coalesce and become one great deliquescent moment?



oh give me wings
for my back,
shining wings
which seek
only virtue

mariko kitakubo

with ribbons streaming

bright cap and streamers,
he sings in the hollow:
come follow, come follow,
all you that love.
leave dreams to the dreamers
that will not after,
that song and laughter
do nothing move.
with ribbons streaming
he sings the bolder;
in troop at his shoulder
the wild bees hum.
and the time of dreaming
dreams is over -- -
as lover to lover,
sweetheart, i come.

james joyce from "chamber music".

in the half-light of a winter morning, light and shadow coexist side-by-side.

undulating across snowy hummocks, thin threads of sunlight rise and settle.

the shadow loves the light.

without the light's knifes-edge glare, the shadow is mere darkness.

some trees

in the still of winter, trees stand tall and silent. you can sense the life in them but it's contained and carefully protected.

nurtured
like a small fire.

they stand there, scratched against the thin blue winter sky that fills with cloud, empties and fills again.

weak branches break off. ice coats every twig. frost cracks the trunk.

and still they stand.

still.



some trees

these are amazing: each
joining a neighbor, as though speech
were a still performance.
arranging by chance

to meet as far this morning
from the world as agreeing
with it, you and i
are suddenly what the trees try

to tell us we are:
that their merely being there
means something; that soon
we may touch, love, explain.

and glad not to have invented
such comeliness, we are surrounded:
a silence already filled with noises,
a canvas on which emerges

a chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
our days put on such reticence
these accents seem their own defense.

john ashbery