As if the air. The mid-day air.

"Panic in the face of the moon--round effendi
Or the phospored sleep in which he walks abroad
Or the majolica dish heaped up with phospored fruit
That he sends ahead, out of the goodness of his heart,
To anyone that comes--panic, because
The moon is no longer these or anything
And nothing is left but comic ugliness
Or a lustred nothingness. Effendi, he
That has lost the folly of the moon becomes
The prince of the proverbs of pure poverty. [...]

Here in the west indifferent crickets chant
Through our indifferent crises. Yet we require
Another chant, an incantation [...]

Truth's favors sonorously exhibited."


-Wallace Stevens, "Esthetique du Mal"

Where I Live

"One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

-Wallace Stevens

(Painting by Gerhard Richter.)