Breakfast at the little horseshoe
What does it mean when you remember nearly every ounce of your breakfast 11.5 years later? The loveliest combination of words in all the French language, Marcy, are these, taken from Le petit fer à cheval breakfast menu. So my plan is to reclaim that bar for myself, at breakfast, someday soon, or to visit with someone who deserves to know the story. And so…
Petit déjeuner complet 14.00
Café, thé Mariage Freres, chocolat, Authentic Chai ou lait chaud, fromage blanc,
la corbeille du boulanger, beurre, confiture bio et miel, oranges pressées à la
commande
Brunch 20.00
Café, thé Mariages Frères, chocolat, Authentic Chai ou lait chaud. Oeuf brouillés,
fromages blanc, la corbeille du boulanger, beure, confiture bio et miel. Oranges
pressées à la commande.
Tartine beurrée ou croissant
LA FIN
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I find that women can be creative in total isolation. I know excellent women artists who do original work without any response to speak of. Maybe they are used to a lack of feedback. Maybe they are tougher.
I’m afraid sometimes you’ll play lonely games too, games you can’t win because you’ll play against you.
Mary Oliver is a native of Maple Hts.! She kinda, sorta slays me. I remember Kristin telling me that Mary Oliver visited Hawken (her high school) and gave a talk/reading. Man, why couldn’t I attend a high school like that, a high school that assigned a senior thesis, independent study, thereby allowing an 18-year-old kid to meet Man Ray’s wife? OK, that deserves 2 ????’s, no?
OK, I’m over it…mostly. Insert Friday smiley face here.
-L.
wow. yes. again.
Hello, Sir. Mary Oliver was from Ohio? Get out. Thanks for posting that poem. Very, very meaningful and resonant. Dude.
I wonder if it would be meaningful and enlightening to think of one’s self as tumbleweed. Just blowing around, letting ourselves be taken up by the breeze, using our sharp points for some traction, but ultimately moving around wherever some force, or multiple forces, breeze us. Or maybe we would do well to think ourselves as a breeze. Oxygen plus movement. A cool breeze—especially on a hot day—is my favorite thing, my favorite sensation. The band director at my high school was nicknamed “Cool Breeze.” I don’t quite get how it applied to him, but hey, I wouldn’t mind if he were willing to share the nickname with me.
We could also aim for Mary Oliver’s sunflowers….
Much love, Delphine
“You do not have to be good”
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
The usual, indeed, the clichéd way of describing empathy as ‘putting yourself in another’s place’ seems to me quite wrong. Empathizing involves, rather, putting another person in yourself, becoming another person’s habitat. But this depends upon your ability to tell the difference between the subject and yourself.
Quote with 1 note
BE PATIENT WITH PAIN
Patience is a way to de-escalate aggression and its accompanying pain. This is to say that when we’re feeling aggressive—and I think this would go for any strong emotion—there’s a seductive quality that pulls us in the direction of wanting to get some resolution. We feel restless, agitated, ill at ease. It hurts so much to feel the aggression that we want it to be resolved. Right then we could change the way we look at this discomfort and practice patience.
Justine, obscured
My yoga instructor read from The Upanishads tonight. And when she read the lines “What does it mean ìto kill the Self? How can the immortal Soul ever be destroyed? It cannot be destroyed, it can only be obscured,” I thought of Justine. This passage may have nothing to do with actual bodily death, with mortality; but it somehow touched me for Justine. And I began speaking to her there in the dark, telling her how blessed I feel to have this thing she never had, but that I also so want to live the way she did, oozing joy and, yes, life.
So I feel taken with the idea that our fathers, Michael, Justine…maybe their souls are just obscured for now. Or, gosh, maybe they’re not; maybe we are so tied to the bills and the commute and the getting through that we obscure their souls. It’s Friday, I am wrung out in the wake of 2 migraines, and that’s all too vast to ponder much more, but there it is, whatever it is.
-L.
How To Burn A Book (for Joanie)
I.
“Poetry From the Heart of Grief” should go first.
“When Bad Things Happen To Good People”—both copies—
must come next,
feed the fire with paper and platitudes.
The books will twist the flames
like a milkmaid’s braid,
tinge the heart of each tongue a pale blue.
You might wish to uncork the wine now,
hoist a steady glass to the dead, always so much easier to love.
II.
At this point, you should feel emboldened.
Of course, the dog is leashed to a nearby oak tree,
so her fervor will appear muted.
Still, she will sense the tight joy straining at your chest
as you toss “Mourning into Dancing” atop the pile.
Follow close behind with “The Grief Recovery Handbook,”
the slim volume a friend pressed into your hands like a secret
before whispering that your mother was “in a better place.”
A word of caution: Do not expect the soft covers to go first.
We can’t decide these things—when something goes, exactly how it happens.
The binding may melt and pool like wax, powder like teeth and bone.
The pages could crisp like marshmallowed skin.
III.
A reminder: You are not aiming for a smoky pile,
a Boy Scout’s first try,
scabbed knees grating the forest floor,
rubbing sticks in the woods,
praying for something, anything, to catch.
Your flames should be fanged.
After a while, the dog may stir,
open her throat in response
to the wayward sparks.
She could mistake the wind for a living thing.
If you so choose, kneel before her.
Scratch her ears.
Whisper: Good girl. Stay.
-L.
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