“Sometimes we can’t find the thing that will make us happy, because we can’t let go of the thing that was supposed to.” ~ Robert Brault

“Villiers le bel” (1887-89)

by Childe Hassam

“Apple Tree in Blossom” (nd, oil on canvas)

by Kazamir Malevich

“Tree Blossoms”

by Theodore Robinson

“Orchard with Blossoming Trees” (1888, oil on canvas)

by Vincent van Gogh

“Bloomy Apple Garden” (1936)

by Nikolay Bogdanov Belsky

“Fruit Trees in Blossom” (1910-11)

by Edvard Munch

“Apple Trees in Blossom” (1896)

by Isaac Levitan

“Orchard in Bloom. Neskuchnoye” (1908)

by Zinaida Zerebriakova

“Apple Trees in Bloom, Old Lyme”

by Childe Hassam

“Apricot Tree in Blossom” (1942)

by Martiros Saryan

“Cherry Tree in Bloom” (1905, oil on canvas)

by Ferdinand Hodler

“Peach Trees in Blossom” (1888, oil on canvas)

by Vincent van Gogh

“Apple Tree, I” (1912, oil on canvas)

by Gustav Klimt

“Lilacs in the Sun” (1872)

by Claude Monet

“Apple Tree after Rain” (1906)

by Mikhail Larionov

“Bluhende Baume” (1935, oil on canvas)

by Ernst Stocker

“Cottonwood Tree in Spring” (1943)

by Georgia O’Keeffe

“Flowering Plum Tree, Eragny” (1894, oil on canvas)

by Camille Pissarro

“Almond Tree in Flower” (1947)

by Pierre Bonnard

“Apple Trees in Full Bloom at Giverny”

by Claude Monet

“Cherry Tree Blossoms”

by Jozsef Rippl-Ronai

“Apple Tree Blooming aka The Eternal Spring” (1908)

by Maurice Denis

                   

Sunday Afternoon Saudade

Here. Have some spring blossoms, scents of apple, peach, lilac, and plum. Listen to some music. Read a poem.

Music by Natalie Walker, “Waking Dream”

Elegy

What to do with this knowledge
that our living is not guaranteed?

Perhaps one day you touch the young branch
of something beautiful. & it grows & grows
despite your birthdays & the death certificate,
& it one day shades the heads of something beautiful
or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out
of your house, then, believing in this.
Nothing else matters.

All above us is the touching
of strangers & parrots,
some of them human,
some of them not human.

Listen to me. I am telling you
a true thing. This is the only kingdom.
The kingdom of touching;
the touches of the disappearing, things.

~ Aracelis Girmay

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“It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer . . . and everything collapses. ” ~ Colette

“Flowering Garden in Spring” (1920, oil on canvas)
by Henri Martin

                   

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.” ~ Iris Murdoch

The Bradford pears and Tulip trees are in full bloom, and I am reminded of the year I made mother’s day cards from photos I had taken of the trees in bloom—I was very pleased with how they had turned out, but my mother looked at hers and said, “What’s this?” Lex later told me that Mom had complained that I was too cheap to buy a card; Lex tried to explain to her that I had shot the photograph, worked with it on Photoshop, and had the print made. I had thought the gesture special. Oh well.

Anyway, I have to admit that when I was clearing out the thousands of cards in my mother’s drawers, I came across almost every card I had given her in the past decade and sometimes beyond, and the flimsy free homemade card I had made her was there.

Here. Have some flowers of spring:

“Wannsee Garden” (1923, oil on canvas) by Max Liebermann

“Poppies and Grasses” (1914, oil on canvas) by Pierre Bonnard

“Spring Breeze” (1946, oil on canvas) by Otto Torsten Andersson

“L’amandier en fleurs” (1947) by Pierre Bonnard

“Orchard with Blossoming Trees” (1888, oil on canvas) by Vincent van Gogh

“Poppies and Violet Asters” (nd, watercolor) by Emil Nolde

“Hyacinth” (1941, oil on board) by Chen Baoyi

“Bloomy Apple Garden” (1936) by Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky

“Black Will-o-the-Wisp” (date unknown, ink and wash) by Takato Yamamoto

“Two Austrian Copper Roses III” (1957, oil on canvas laid down on board) by Georgia O’Keeffe

“Sunflowers” (1958-59, oil on board) by Peter Coker

“The Poppy FIelds” (c1963) by Anne Redpath

“Apple Tree Blooming” aka “The Eternal Spring” (1908) by Maurice Denis

“Flowers by the Sea” (1965, oil on composition board) by Fairfield Porter

“Pink Roses” (1890, oil on canvas) by Vincent van Gogh

“Les Dahlias” (1921, oil on canvas) by Tsuguhara Foujita

“Glass with Wild Flowers” (1890, oil on canvas) by Vincent van Gogh

“The Orchard” (nd, oil on canvas) by Robert William Vonnoh

“Yellow Irises” (1901, oil on canvas) by Pablo Picasso

“Poppy Field” by Michael Creese (nd)

“Pink and Yellow Tree” (nd, oil on canvas) by Albert Henry Krehbiel

“Flowers on a Chair” (1958, oil on canvas) by Adrian Ryan

“Meadow” (1913, oil on canvas) by Mikko Oinonen

“Still Life with Pansies and Gladiolas” (nd, oil on canvas) by Arthur B. Carles

“Marsh Marigolds” (1906) by Wladyslaw Slewinski

“Les Roses” (1925-26, oil on canvas) by Claude Monet

“Paris Bouquet of Wild Flowers” (1923) by Pierre Bonnard

“Magnolien” (1945, oil on canvas) by Cuno Amiet

“Petunias” (1925, oil on hardboard panel) by Georgia O’Keeffe

“Flower Garden, Pansies” (1908, oil on canvas) by Emil Nolde

Music by Mussorgsky,  “Pictures at an Exhibition” (Promenade), performed by The Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra

“The heart is a foreign country whose language none | of us is good at” ~ Jack Gilbert, from “Meanwhile”

“Landscape, Olive Trees, Corfu (1909, watercolor), by John Singer Sargent

“Olive Trees” (nd), by Constantine Maleas

“Avenue of Olive Trees” (1952, oil on canvas), by Henri Matisse

“Olive Grove, Bright Blue Sky” (1889), by Vincent van Gogh

“Grove of Olive Trees in Bordighera” (1884), by Claude Monet

                   

“It turned out that being together
at twilight in the olive groves of Umbria
did, indeed, measure everything after that.” ~ Jack Gilbert, from “Living Hungry After”

Some poems from Jack Gilbert’s book The Dance Most of All: Poems

Winter in the Night Fields

I was getting water tonight
off guard when I saw the moon
in my bucket and was tempted
by those Chinese poets
and their immaculate pain.

---

After Love

He is watching the music with his eyes closed.
Hearing the piano like a man moving
through the woods thinking by feeling.
The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,
step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,
but always returning to quiet, like the man
remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,
mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure
in the loss. In the yearning. The pain
going this way and that. Never again.
Never bodied again. Again the never.
Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.
A humming beauty in the silence.
To having been. Having had. And the man
knowing all of him will come to the end.

---

Going Home

Mother was the daughter of sharecroppers.
And my father the black sheep of rich Virginia
merchants. She went barefoot until twelve.
He ran away with the circus at fourteen.
Neither one got through grammar school.
And here I am in the faculty toilet
trying to remember the dates of Emperor Vespasian.

                   

Music by Black Lab, “Weightless”