another valentine

To Plath, to Sexton

So what use was poetry
to a white empty house?

Wolf, swan, hare,
in by the fire.

And when your tree
crashed through your house,

what use then
was all your power?

It was the use of you.
It was the flower.

-- Jean Valentine, The River at Wolf

difficult loves

The boy swung the muzzle of the gun around again.  It was strange, thinking it over, to be so surrounded by air, separated from other things by yards of air.  When he aimed the gun, on the other hand, the air was a straight invisible line drawn tight from the mouth of the rifle to the target, to the hawk flying up there in the sky with wings that did not seem to move.  When he pressed the trigger, the air was still as empty and transparent as before, but up there, at the other end of the line, the hawk was folding its wings and dropping like a stone.  From the open bolt floated the good smell of gunpowder.

                                                                       -- Italo Calvino, "The Crow Comes Last"

from Austerlitz

(just one of so many brilliant, quotable, single-sentence passages...)

"The frequent result, said Austerlitz, of resorting to measures of fortification marked in general by a tendency towards paranoid elaboration was that you drew attention to your weakest point, practically inviting the enemy to attack it, not to mention the fact that as architectural plans for fortifications became increasingly complex, the time it took to build them increased as well, and with it the probability that as soon as they were finished, if not before, they would have been overtaken by further developments, both in artillery and in strategic planning, which took account of the growing realization that everything was decided in movement, not in a state of rest."

— W. G. Sebald     

via lattea

Via Lattea 

by Jessica Abel 

(ca. 1995, and greatly diminished without her illustrations)

Do you know what the Milky Way is?

The galaxy is a great spinning disk, and we are inside the disc, and the Milky Way is what it looks like from the inside, edge on.

Some people look up and feel insignificant.  I choose to look up and feel a part of something huge.

Do you ever feel, in the summer, a night like a balm, like a kiss, like a soft velvet cape about your shoulders? 

A night that feels like nothing can be bad?  

A night that, despite its softness, feels like an adrenaline shot in your veins?

A night that feels like it belongs to an alternate-universe-you who lives a much happier life?

It's some sort of alchemy of heat and dark and stagelights, or streetlights, or starlight, that turns the leaden night into gold, 
                  
... and makes your heart stand in your throat.  You have to be in it, now, because you can't save it.  

It is fleeting.