Maurice Denis – Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings

“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

Published on May 18, 2014May 18, 2014 by Poietes1 Comment

“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

“All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and ever procrastination, every word, all of it.” ~ Joan Didion, from “Goodbye to All That”

Published on April 22, 2014 by Poietes2 Comments

Kurt Schwitters Untitled paren Tenartional 1942 — Untitled (1942)
by Kurt Schwitters

Two for Tuesday: The Relentless Passing of Time

Louis-Georges-Eleonor Figure in the Moonlight 1887 gouache on paper — “Figure in the Moonlight” (1887, gouache on paper)
by Louis-Georges-Eleonor

If You Knew

What if you knew you”d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line”s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don”t remember
they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They”d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt”s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked a half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon”s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

~ Ellen Bass

Maurice Denis Residence with a Pond c1895 — “Residence with a Pond” (c1895)
by Maurice Denis

String of Pearls

The pearls my mother gave me as a bride
rotted inside.
Well, not the pearls, but the string.
One day I was putting
them on, about thirty years on,
and they rattled onto the floor, one by one…
I’m still not sure I found them all.

As it happened, I kept a white seashell
on my vanity table. It could serve as a cup
where, after I’d scooped the lost pearls up,
I’d save them, a many-sister
haven in one oyster.
A female’s born with all her eggs,
unfolds her legs,

then does her dance, is lovely, is the past –
is old news as the last
crinkle-foil-wrapped sweet
in the grass of the Easter basket.
True? Who was I? Had I unfairly classed
myself as a has-been? In the cloister
of the ovary, when

released by an extra dose of estrogen,
my chances for love dwindled, one by one.
But am I done?

~ Mary Jo Salter

Music by Nathan Barr, “Love Theme from True Blood”

“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

Published on April 2, 2014April 4, 2014 by Poietes2 Comments

Henri Martin FLowering Garden in Spring oil on canvas 1920 — “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: