i believe it was June when i needed blue.

The Prodigal Son: Still life in slow motion

A blue decanter for the birds of paradise. He thinks they are actually birds and when the water evaporates he doesn’t say the flowers have wilted; he tells you, instead, that the birds have died of thirst. This is as close as he comes to a vision of heaven though it’s less than mythical, and fragile as a hollow bone. He hopes to find—days later, when he returns—the various components settled, like an argument. A blue decanter because the vase, Cézanne-green, is cracked; or because the stems of the flowers are too large and it will not occur to him, who thinks they are birds’ legs, to trim them. Why not tulips, then? Or weeds, when a small assortment of these will do just as well? He tilts the empty decanter as if to pour, as if to demonstrate and witness the difference between pouring and spilling.

—Dionisio D. Martínez, Climbing Back

(via johanna-tagada)

commovente: Plant, Rebecca Veit, 2003

Short Talk on Orchids

by Anne Carson

We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive. To me, the tunnels you make will seem strangely aimless, uprooted orchids. But the fragrance is undying. A Little Boy has run away from Amherst a few Days ago, writes Emily Dickinson in a letter of 1883, and when asked where he was going, he replied, Vermont or Asia.

—Plainwater (Knopf, 1995)

(Source: gammasandgerunds)

(Source: yannick-b, via concealedsimplicity)

“Poetry should be written the way adultery is committed: on the run, on the sly, during the time not accounted for. And then you come home, as if nothing ever happened.
→
Pick a piece of wood floating in the river and follow it down the current with your glance, keeping the eyes constantly on it, without getting ahead of the current. This is the way poetry should be read: at the pace of a line.
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To write in spite of everything, even when generally speaking there is nothing to spite.
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Suddenly you realize that only what you have put into poems can be considered lived through. That is how you become a poet. And at that point you begin, consciously or otherwise, living the kind of life that is fraught with poetry. That is how you cease being human. The former happens abruptly, the latter gradually, both irrevocably.
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I write to equalize the pressure from without and from within, to prevent being squashed (by misery) or being blown apart (by happiness).
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Reader: Do you want me to recognize my everyday world in your poems?
Poet: No, I want your world to seem unfamiliar to you, once you take your eyes off the text.
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The longer a poem, the weaker the impression that it has been dictated from above: Heaven is not verbose. Besides, the more you talk, the more you lie.”

— Vera Pavlova, Heaven Is Not Verbose: A Notebook

(via wishflowers)

“Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”

—Rumi

(Source: likeafieldmouse, via ginandbird)

Because the story of our life
becomes our life

Because each of us tells
the same story
but tells it differently

and none of us tells it
the same way twice
— Lisel Mueller, Why We Tell Stories