we touch each other.
how?
with wings that beat…
— Rainer Maria Rilke, in an inscription to Marina Tsvetaeva, from Letters Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Rilke
Photo: DK. Gull. 6:56 am, February 14, 2021. 28° F, feels like 20° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
Photos: DK @ Daybreak. Snow flurries. 6:05 am. to 6:28 am, February 1, 2021. 26° F, feels like 11° F, wind gusts up to 44 mph. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
How many times have you noticed that it’s the little quiet moments in the midst of life that seem to give the rest extra-special meaning.
— Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers
Notes:
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.
— Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
Photo: Daybreak. Jan 9, 2021. 6:54 am. 24° F, feels like 13° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford CT
This was also the month (January 1949) Mr. Crockett famously rounded up his charges to watch the sun rise over Babson Park and recite poetry. Sylvia wrote, “The early hour was so that everyone could hear ‘dawn take her first breath’ and thereby reach a higher ‘kinship with infinity.’
— Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Knopf; October 27, 2020)
Notes:
How much space for remembering is there in a day? How much should there be? I think about this in my poetry. I don’t want to be a nostalgist. Yet I feed on memory, need it to make poems, the art that is made of the stuff I have: my life and the world around me. I am grateful for the tug of the day that gets us out of bed and propels us into our lives and responsibilities; memory can be a weight on that. And yet, in it floods, brought willfully, or brought on by a glimpse, a glance, a scent, a sound.
— Elizabeth Alexander, “The Light of the World: A Memoir.”
Daybreak. December 21, 2020. 6:45 to 7:46 am. 34° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford CT
Notes:
Photo: DK, 6:30, 6:35 and 7:12 a.m., Sunday, Nov 29, 2020, 33° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
