Our Cozy Kitchen In The Late Afternoon

Our cozy kitchen in the late afternoon

the miracle of being here

invitation, mary oliver// @arthoesunshine // when death comes, mary oliver//to be alive, gregory ott// the dead poets society(1989), quote: walden, henry david thoreau// joseph campbell// the aeneid, virgil// @babyangel-jpg // @rawjoy //sweet, charles bukowski// that it will never come again, emily dickinson// bjenny montero// ? // ? // moments, mary oliver// madness a bipolar life, marya hornbacher// wild geese, mary oliver// letters to a young poet, rainer maria rilke// on earth we're briefly gorgeous, ocean vuong// @ashstfu // i thought on his desire for three days, linda gregg

"Romeo and Juliets romance is just so unrealistic! It's not what a romance is like in MY experience!"

Oh? Oh really? You, adult living in 2022, you never went to a fancy Venetian masquerade in the 1590s and met a mysterious stranger and then your first conversation spontaneously forms a perfect sonnet? That's not a totally relatable experience for you?

Is Macbeth unrealistic because of the witches? Is Midsummer unrealistic because of the love potion?

Like, there's no explicit magic in Romeo and Juliet, but it still exists in a heightened reality, and overlooking the role that language plays within the text itself kneecaps your analysis of the intent.

When we hear of Romeo, his dad and friends are discussing his recent sad mood- he's upset because the girl he likes has no interest in him. His friends try to distract him from it with a party, but dont really seem to...connect with or fully empathize with his sadness. When we first hear of Juliet, her father and Paris are planning her marriage (without her input.) They are both talked about but not really listened to. The way they are spoken about isolates them from others.

Then they meet, and with no knowledge of each other, not even their names, they click into perfect rhythm. They finish each other rhymes. They form perfect ABAB quatrains in conversation, their sentences form a rhyming *couplet* at the end.

You know the song Ana sings with Hans in Frozen? Love is an open door? We finish each others- Sandwiches? Yeah- it's riffing on this. The idea that you meet someone perfect and right away your souls can make poetry together. The immediate intimacy of being so in sync that your introduction is a love poem.

I don't know, yall. Romeo and Juliet isn't a gritty hyper-realistic Oscar nominated docu-drama. It teters on the edge of fairy tale and myth, it leans on its language to convey deeper emotional truths that a 5 act play doesn't have the time to develop as deeply as we, in our world of movie montages and long form TV, are more accustomed to. This isn't a slow burn, pining, enemies to friends to lovers. It's soul mates love at first sight, and when you accept that, the play can get on with the business of saying what it wants to say about hate and the cycle of violence and social rules and decorum and how grudges and blood fueds can destroy the magic in the world if we let it.

"It doesn't matter if they are really in love. They should be allowed to be stupid hormonal teenagers without dying" I see many people say, and while I think that sentiment is true, I DO think it matters that they are in love. I think it matters that their meeting sparks a sonnet, and that poetry is snuffed out by the violence around them.

I think it matters that what they had wasn't an arranged marriage or a "good match" made by approving friends- that it was spontaneous and instant and inexplicable, but that the world couldn't let that be because it defied all the rules. Because it wasn't set up by parents and wasn't politically convenient, because it wasn't part of a proper, prolonged courtship with chaperones and social approval- it was love and poetry that defied all of that and so it was snuffed out. That they are pushed to such extremes not just by the killings, but by Juliets impending engagement to Paris, they have to act now because their love doesnt fit into the proper pattern set out by society- I think that matters.

Saint Sebastian Tended by the Holy Irene and her Servant [detail] (1626-1630) | Nicolas Regnier

jesse from breaking bad top surgery

hello darling can you please share some favorite lines that relate to the senses ? each if possible,,,,,,, touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste ? much love !

“The caress is not a simple stroking; it is a shaping.” (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction )

(Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch) 

“No one’s serious at seventeen.–On beautiful nights when beer and lemonadeAnd loud, blinding cafés are the last thing you need–You stroll beneath green lindens on the promenade.

Lindens smell fine on fine June nights!Sometimes the air is so sweet that you close your eyes;The wind brings sounds–the town is near–And carries scents of vineyards and beer…[…]June nights! Seventeen! –Drink it in.Sap is champagne, it goes to your head…The mind wanders, you feel a kissOn your lips, quivering like a living thing…” (Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Novel’)

(Adonis, ‘Transformations of the Lover’)

“Everything about him as he walks through the high grasses [is] green: his head, his shoulders, his clothes are tinted green: above all, his face is the greenest green: it is as if his body gives out a greenness, one I can nearly taste, as if my mouth has been filled with leaves and grass–” (Ali Smith, How to Be Both)

“Gold colossal domes of cumulus cloudLift over the undulant, sibilant forest.The air presses against the earth.Thunder breaks over the mountains.Far off, over the Adirondacks,Lightning quivers, almost invisibleIn the bright sky, violet againstThe grey, deep shadows of the bellied clouds.The sweet virile hair of thunder stormsBrushes over the swelling horizon.Take off your shoes and stockings.I will kiss your sweet legs and feetAs they lie half buried in the tangleOf rank scented midsummer flowers.[…] Let your body sinkLike honey through the hotGranular fingers of summer.” (Kenneth Rexroth, ‘When We With Sappho’)

(Adonis, ‘Transformations of the Lover’)

“I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst.” (Anais Nin, Diaries)

“When I get home I put on some water to boil to make tea and then I remember [the biscuits]. I unwrap one. Oval and the colour of baked bread. The size of a tongue. Yours or mine. Polvoro Arteseno de Almendra. A slight smell of cinnamon. Weight: 32gr. each. I take a small bite for both of us. The baked wheat flour and almond dust, sweet and a little greasy, lines the top of the palette, it sticks to the curved roof of the mouth, whilst below, on the floor, on our tongue lie tiny fragments of roasted nut to shift between the teeth and bite into. Munching a Biblia is like pulling an almond blanket over our two heads to keep out sand, rain, the wind or the probing searchlight from the mirador.” (John Berger, From A to X: A Story in Letters)

( Verónica Volkow, interviewed for Filling Station)

“My lips and fingers were pens on her flesh. /  I memorized her in every alphabetand memorized my memories until they multiplied…”  (Adonis, ‘Transformations of the Lover’)

“At no other time than autumn does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.” (Rilke, Letters on Cézanne)

“Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. In which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage, can be that third language that animates where the tongue falters.” (Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel)

“Part her darkness with your tonguestill she remains hiddensilk drenched against skin…” (Anne Michaels, ‘Sea of Lanterns’) 

( Hélène Cixous, Poetry in painting: writings on contemporary arts and aesthetics)

“Remember that a waterfall is a girl coming down the stairs dying of laughter.” (Octavio Paz, ‘A Fable of Joan Miro’)

“Where is the scent of cloves coming from??her hair?armpit?or her dressthrown on the Tunisian rug?From the third step in the house?Laylamakes everything smell of cloves.Laylais the orchard when it’s wet.She iswhat the orchard breatheswhen it’s watered at nightLayla knows nowthat I am drunk with the scent of cloves […]My fingers are numb,over the dunes she knowsmy pulse is hers,my water is hers.Laylaleaves me sleeping,rocking between cloudsand cloves.” (Saadi Youssef, ‘Cloves’)

“The longing to touch/be touched. I feel gratitude when I touch someone—as well as affection etc. The person has allowed me proof that I have a body—and that there are bodies in the world.” (Susan Sontag, Consciousness Is Harnessed To Flesh)

(Roja Dove, interview for The Cut)

“How soft and gentle her name sounds when I whisper it. It lingers on the tongue, insidious and slow, almost like poison, which is apt indeed. It passes from the tongue to the parched lips, and from the lips back to the heart.” (Daphne du Maurier, My Cousin Rachel) 

“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.” (Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping)

(Clarice Lispector, Água Viva)

“He could see her smell; it glowed against the backs of his eyelids, pure shimmering gold to deep undulating amber. And he could taste each note; savour the melting progression on his tongue, the shocking, perfect combination of contrasts, underpinned by a creamy, intensely carnal core of raw sexuality.” (Kathleen Tessaro, The Perfume Collector)

(Ali Smith, How to Be Both)

“…The heat between two hands about to touch, the language that exists in that silence.” (Chelsea Hodson, ‘A Simple Woman’)

“My body must remember everything, this brief insect bite, smell of wet fruit, the slow snail light, rain, rain, and underneath the hint of colours a sound of furious wet birds whose range of mimicry includes what one imagines to be large beasts, trains, burning electricity. Dark Trees…the slow air pinned down by rain.” (Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family)

(Seamus Heaney, ‘Blackberry Picking’)

“I could hardly glance at youbefore marriagenever touch you- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.I buried my handsin saffron, disguised themover smoking tar,helped the honey gatherers …

When we swam onceI touched you in water […]what good is itto be the lime burner’s daughterleft with no traceas if not spoken to in the act of loveas if wounded without the pleasure of a scar.

You touchedyour belly to my handsin the dry air and saidI am the cinnamonpeeler’s wife. Smell me.” (Michael Ondaatje, ‘The Cinnamon Peeler’s Wife’)

(Octavio Paz, ‘Wind From All Compass Points’)

“I trace the nude bodies in white marble with my eyes, and then trace them with my fingertips: a child of ten, mesmerized, looking at the photograph of Auguste Rodin’s carved statue, The Kiss. Years later I touch a real lover in the flesh and enter more deeply into the realm of the erotic. This memory of sensual touch haunts us always, whether, a fleeting image, a brief touch with a stranger, nights of long lovemaking with a devoted lover, or years of sleeping close with the familiar one; it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we were touched in some way, sometime, somewhere, and, once touched by love, by the erotic, it is never forgotten, no matter how small or how great.” (Patricia Donegan, Haiku Mind)

“Touch: / light in the night of the bodies”  (Octavio Paz, ‘Letter of Testimony’)