So Like Still Water

In Ireland, even the bottled water is literary!

“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

― William Butler Yeats
The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore

The Old Men Admiring Themselves In The Water

I heard the old, old men say,
"Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away."
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
I heard the old, old men say,
"All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters."

― William Butler (1865 - 1939)

P.S.
Lots More Yeats
"accustomed, ceremonious" ~ "take down this book"

R.I.P ~ E.A.P.

Rest in Peace ~ Edgar Allan Poe
January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849

"Three Little Poe - ettes"
Thanks to Antoinette & Igor for the Poe - themed Whimsy!

Favorite Poe Quotes

“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of
fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”

“If you wish to forget anything on the spot,
make a note that this thing is to be remembered.”

“I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.”

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Compare this line from Poe . . .

“Every poem should remind the reader
that they are going to die.”

with this one from Thomas Pynchon . . .

"When we speak of 'seriousness' in fiction, ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death -- how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate. Everybody know this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the apprentice age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted." (p 146)

quoted by David Shields
in his amazing book:
The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead

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Compare this line from Poe . . .

“A short story must have a single mood
and every sentence must build towards it.”

with this anecdote from Annie Dillard . . .

Dillard tells the story of a fellow
writer who was asked by a student:
"Do you think I could be a writer?"

"Well," the writer said, "do you like sentences?"

~ The Writing Life (1989)

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Of course, Poe is just right when it comes to
black cats, and ravens, and Halloween . . .
but also Christmas and Valentine's Day!

Dear E. A. P.,
We wish your days had been longer upon this earth.

Picture Perfect Leaves

Trapeze

It leans on me, this changing season,
breathless as these old photographs

under the lamp. White smiles will
smile forever; the tossed ball is fixed in

space and will not move, nor will
divers, diving, ever touch water.

Even the leaves outside my window
do not move. Gilded now, they pose:

picture perfect leaves posing for me---
or for whoever, looking up, tomorrow,

might happen to see their trapeze act:
the wave to the crowd, a flutter and

spins in rising air for the letting go;
then the vertiginous game with sudden

wind, yellow skirts lifted in spiraling
exuberance before the plummet.

By Dorothea Tanning (1910 – 2012)
American poet and artist
Found in her book Coming to That

Quoted also on my recent post:
Grandmothers in the Stars

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Special Effects by Instatoon

Previous ~ Sidewalk Leaves

Autumn, Without Diminishment

Good Shepherd Card from
Mother Nancy C. Tiederman

Autumn

Again the wind
flakes gold-leaf from the trees
and the painting darkens—
as if a thousand penitents
kissed an icon
till it thinned
back to bare wood,
without diminishment.

By Jane Hirshfield (born 1953)
American poet and translator
From her beautiful book The October Palace

More Hirshfield on my recent Fortnightly post:
Grandmothers in the Stars
Also perfect for the Autumnal Equinox or Leap Day!

Researching the Ancestors

Pioneers of the West, 1934
Helen Lundeberg, 1908 – 1999

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Beautiful surroundings . . . those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry aromatic odour. . . . one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert."

from Death Comes for the Archbishop
Book IX, Ch. 3, pp 272-73
by Willa Cather

Recent Fortnightlies:

July 28 ~ Missing, Presumed Dead

August 14 ~ Missing Ancestors

August 28 ~ Your Mother, Her Grandfather

September 14 ~ Grandmothers in the Stars

September 28 ~ Birkinbines