Flowers learn from us

Two thoughts:

Is the fur hat for emphasis? I do believe it is.

Also, more songs should have flute solos.

From Antonina Vallentin

The storm of the French Revolution attacked the princely graves anew, churches were destroyed and their dead disturbed in the name of new rights. Little is known of the fate of the chapel at Amboise in the time of the great Revolution. But if the grave weathered that storm, it fell victim at last to the picks and hatchets that brought down the crumbling, weather worn chapel, no longer safe to use, in 1808. The vandals who did the work of destruction sold the marble slabs and gravestones and even melted the lead of the coffins. The chapel became a heap of ruins on the castle hill, on which children played with the bones of the dead, playing ball with the grinning skulls until they disintegrated. One night a gardener collected the scattered remains and buried them together in the dark. The mortal remains were mixed with those of other men and with the soil beneath the sward of Amboise park, to be trodden upon for decades thereafter by indifferent visitors.
In the age of the Romantics, who knew what they owed to their dead, a French poet, Arsene Houssaye, made a search for the dead and forgotten Leonardo. Among skeletons of unknown persons he found the bleached bones of a tall man, and a large skull which might be assumed to have once contained the brain of that great genius. Houssaye reverently collected together the remains that seemed to belong to this skeleton, and buried the corpse in the chapel of St. Blaise, the chapel above whose proch little King Charles VIII prays in his great crown, with his thin hands folded. On the simple gravestone which now covers the mortal remains perhaps of Leonardo. perhaps of another person, an inscription was placed:

Under this stone
rest bones
collected during the
excavations in the former
royal chapel of Amboise
among which it is surmised
that there are the mortal remains
of Leonardo da Vinci

Wildflowers

Easter Sunday met me in a white lace dress. Out in the ranches in the hills is a tiny church set in the open range. We were given flowers as we walked in, and one woman in particular was blessed, and the priest wrapped her in a blanket. I sang. We went to Tommy's ranch to eat Arkansas Traveler and play golf-fetch. Golf-fetch involves driving a golf ball into the middle of the blue stem wilderness and the dogs retrieving it. I did not dye Easter Eggs this year, but there is time if I hurry to it tomorrow.

I have picked up The Tragic Pursuit of Perfection by Antonina Vallentin, which I suspect is riddled with errors, but it gives me Ciascun grida per godere E muoia chi non vuol cantare and other songs.

Tremendously yours, Anna

Today I saw plants from my girlhood: sand dollars, trumpet vine, wysteria, onion grass, star moss, snapdragons. I only ever really want to buy bouquets of snapdragons or queen anne's lace. The room is hot and my brow is cool. My formalities cripple my ability to send notes to strangers: "sincerely" is too coldly formal, I am often not "yours", and "cheers" and "best" are the verbal equivalent of flip flops. I've settled on either "Regards" or "Best Regards" depending on my level of exuberance. Naturally, I'll close notes to people I know any which way: "Very surely" "Awfully" and "Tremendously" are late favorites.

Martian Dancing

Wikipedia writes poetry about cavities.

A cavity is a hole that can also hurt your teeth. To cure a cavity you have to go to the dentist. It may refer to:

* Dental cavity, damage to the structure of teeth
* Resonator, a device designed to select for waves of particular wavelengths
* Optical cavity, the cavity resonator of a laser
* Cavitation, the phenomenon of partial vacuums forming in fluid, for example, in propellors
* Cavitary pneumonia, a type of pneumonia in which a hole is formed in the lung

From a journal found in my desk.

In the morning I was dreaming of sweet and tiny Latina siblings who were indecipherable and who brought home their schoolwork to show me. Whoa, brother and sister, I love you.

Give me grace, give me mercy, and give me good strong will.

I am Obsessed.

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.

Mallarme nee Edwards nee Harpers

These nymphs that I would perpetuate:
so clear
And light, their carnation, that it floats in the air
Heavy with leafy slumbers.
Did I love a dream?
My doubt, night’s ancient hoard, pursues its theme
In branching labyrinths, which being still
The veritable woods themselves, alas, reveal
My triumph as the ideal fault of roses.
Consider…
if the women of your glosses
Are phantoms of your fabulous desires!
Faun, the illusion flees from the cold, blue eyes
Of the chaster nymph like a fountain gushing tears:
But the other, all in sighs, you say, compares
To a hot wind through the fleece that blows at noon?
No! through the motionless and weary swoon
Of stifling heat that suffocates the morning,
Save from my flute, no waters murmuring
In harmony flow out into the groves;
And the only wind on the horizon no ripple moves,
Exhaled from my twin pipes and swift to drain
The melody in arid drifts of rain,
Is the visible, serene and fictive air
Of inspiration rising as if in prayer.
Relate, Sicilian shores, whose tranquil fens
My vanity disturbs as do the suns,
Silent beneath the brilliant flowers of flame:
“That cutting hollow reeds my art would tame,
I saw far off, against the glaucous gold
Of foliage twined to where the springs run cold,
An animal whiteness languorously swaying;
To the slow prelude that the pipes were playing,
This flight of swans — no! naiads — rose in a shower
Of spray…”

Geeta Dutt

Temple to the Sun

Wat Rong Khun (white temple)
Originally uploaded by Last Known Location

Scientists from the American Astronomical Society attended their annual meeting and agreed that the universe is bizarre and violent. “This is the glory of the universe,” said the association's president. “What is odd and what is normal is changing.”

Hamann

What Tarquin the Proud said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger.

Oh boy!

Drove back to Iowa with a hallucinogenic fever. The clouds rolled down to the edge of the road, a great grey wall that made the trucks light up like carnival tents. Next day I was shaky and debilitated, unable to sit up or concentrate, something I haven't experienced in a long time. Mouth tasted like pine nuts, truly the worst of all possible tastes, and that prevented me from consuming anything. My inability to drink water made me temporarily wonder if I had rabies. Today I got dressed, walked around in the house, and ingested a glass of milk and a carrot. Oh boy!