Rainy day

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what is is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
(e.e.cummings)

the painting is Rain, by Gustave Caillebotte

Art on a cold Sunday

Called a masterpiece from the very first day,Manet's train station, the Gare Saint Lazare, is a favourite of mine. I love airports and railway stations, mainly because I like to sit there watching the people go by, guessing where they come from and where they're going to, I am the little girl on Manet's painting, also from the first time I saw this work.

de profundis

OH why is heaven built so far,
Oh why is earth set so remote?
I cannot reach the nearest star
That hangs afloat.
I would not care to reach the moon,
One round monotonous of change;
Yet even she repeats her tune
Beyond my range.
I never watch the scatter'd fire
Of stars, or sun's far-trailing train,
But all my heart is one desire,
And all in vain:
For I am bound with fleshly bands,
Joy, beauty, lie beyond my scope;
I strain my heart, I stretch my hands,
And catch at hope.
(Christina Rossetti)

A sea of one's own

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea, 1906

Painting by Edward Hopper

An Atlantic mood

Atlantique, painted by Jean-Louis Courteau

The timeless waves, bright, sifting, broken glass,
Came dazzling around, into the rocks,
Came glinting, sifting from the Americas

To posess Aran. Or did Aran rush
to throw wide arms of rock around a tide
That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash?

Did sea define the land or land the sea?
Each drew new meaning from the waves' collision.
Sea broke on land to full identity.

(Lovers on Aran, by Seamus Heaney)

A lighthouse of one's own

"When darkness fell, the stroke of the Lighthouse, which had laid itself 
with such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern, 
came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding gently 
as if it laid its caress and lingered stealthily and looked and came 
lovingly again." ( Virginia Woolf, To the 
Lighthouse)

the painting is The Lighthouse at Colliure (1905) by fauve artist André Derain

Southern Gardens

(painting by Paul Klee)
Color of lemon, mango, peach,
These storybook villas
Still dream behind
Shutters, their balconies
Fine as handmade lace,
Or a leaf-and-flower pen-sketch.

Tilting with the winds,
On arrowy stems,
Pineapple-barked,
A green crescent of palms
Sends up its forked
Firework of fronds.

A quartz-clear dawn
Inch by bright inch
Gilds all our Avenue,
And out of the blue drench
Of Angels' Bay
Rises the round red watermelon sun ( poem by Sylvia Plath)