Waxing Poetic: My Heart by Frank O'Hara

My Heart

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar. And if
some aficionado of my mess says "That's
not like Frank!", all to the good! I
don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,
do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--
you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

Piccadilly Jim: Filling Out a Form for a Transatlantic Crossing

The clerk had finished writing the ticket, and was pressing labels and a pink paper on him. The paper, he gathered dully, was a form and had to be filled up. He examined it, and found it to be a searching document. Some of its questions could be answered off-hand, others required thought.

“Height?” Simple. Five foot eleven.

“Hair?” Simple. Brown.

“Eyes?” Simple again. Blue.

Next, queries of a more offensive kind.

“Are you a polygamist?”

He could answer that. Decidedly no. One wife would be ample—provided she had red-gold hair, brown-gold eyes, the right kind of mouth, and a dimple. Whatever doubts there might be in his mind on other points, on that one he had none whatever.

“Have you ever been in prison?” Not yet.

And then a very difficult one. “Are you a lunatic?”

Jimmy hesitated. The ink dried on his pen. He was wondering.

— P. G. Wodehouse, Piccadilly Jim (p. 62)

The Art of Reading: Pretty Girl Reading in the Dark - Georges Pavis

Saturday Snapshot: Squirrel Update

For those of you who have been following our blog, you might remember our squirrel photos from early this year. Well, they're still here, and now they're building a nest on our balcony!

Bookish Quotes #41

“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.”
~ Philip Pullman

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They depen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”
~ Anne Lamott

Waxing Poetic: The Ponds by Mary Oliver

The Ponds

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count all of them --

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided --
and that one wears an orange blight --
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away --
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled --
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing --
that the light is everything -- that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading.  And I do.

The Art of Reading: Old Letters and Dead Leaves by Claude Andrew Calthrop