WORDS FOR THE WIND

1
Love, love, a lily's my care,
She's sweeter than a tree.
Loving, I use the air
Most lovingly: I breathe;
Mad in the wind I wear
Myself as I should be,
All's even with the odd,
My brother the vine is glad.

Are flower and seed the same?
What do the great dead say?
Sweet Phoebe, she's my theme:
She sways whenever I sway.
"O love me while I am,
You green thing in my way!"
I cried, and the birds came down
And made my song their own.

Motion can keep me still:
She kissed me out of thought
As a lovely substance will;
She wandered; I did not:
I stayed, and light fell
Across her pulsing throat;
I stared, and a garden stone
Slowly became the moon.

The shallow stream runs slack;
The wind creaks slowly by;
Out of a nestling's beak
Comes a tremulous cry
I cannot answer back;
A shape from deep in the eye-
That woman I saw in a stone-
Keeps pace when I walk alone.


2
The sun declares the earth;
The stones leap in the stream;
On a wide plain, beyond
The far stretch of a dream,
A field breaks like the sea;
The wind's white with her name,
And I walk with the wind.

The dove's my will today.
She sways, half in the sun:
Rose, easy on a stem,
One with the sighing vine,
One to be merry with,
And pleased to meet the moon.
She likes wherever I am.

Passion's enough to give
Shape to a random joy:
I cry delight: I know
The root, the core of a cry.
Swan-heart, arbutus-calm,
She moves when time is shy:
Love has a thing to do.

A fair thing grows more fair;
The green, the springing green
Makes an intenser day
Under the rising moon;
I smile, no mineral man;
I bear, but not alone,
The burden of this joy.


3
Under a southern wind,
The birds and fishes move
North, in a single stream;
The sharp stars swing around;
I get a step beyond
The wind, and there I am,
I'm odd and full of love.

Wisdom, where is it found?-
Those who embrace, believe.
Whatever was, still is,
Says a song tied to a tree.
Below, on the ferny ground,
In rivery air, at ease,
I walk with my true love.

What time's my heart? I care.
I cherish what I have
Had of the temporal:
I am no longer young
But the winds and waters are;
What falls away will fall;
All things bring me to love.


4
The breath of a long root,
The shy perimeter
Of the unfolding rose,
The green, the altered leaf,
The oyster's weeping foot,
And the incipient star-
Are part of what she is.
She wakes the ends of life.

Being myself, I sing
The soul's immediate joy.
Light, light, where's my repose?
A wind wreathes round a tree.
A thing is done: a thing
Body and spirit know
When I do what she does:
Creaturely creature, she!-

I kiss her moving mouth,
Her swart hilarious skin;
She breaks my breath in half;
She frolicks like a beast;
And I dance round and round,
A fond and foolish man,
And see and suffer myself
In another being, at last.

Theodore Roethke

Rockefeller Center Skating Rink at Night, New York City, 1950
Arthur Lavine

Untitled (Self-Portrait with Elizabeth), March 27, 1921
André Kertész

Climates (2006)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Hunger (1966)
Henning Carlsen

Macaria, fotonovela para la revista “Capricho”, ca. 1970
Antonio Caballero

Riverside Drive at 83rd St., New York, 1914
Paul Strand

Bareback Riders, 1886
W.H. Brown

Unable to sleep, I spent the whole night seeing her figure all
   by itself
And seeing it always in ways different from when I see her in
   person.
I fashion thoughts from my memory of how she is when she
   talks to me,
And in each thought she's a variation on her likeness.
To love is to think.
And from thinking of her so much, I almost forget to feel.
I don't really know what I want, even from her, and she's all I
   think of.
My distraction is as large as life.
When I feel like being with her,
I almost prefer not being with her,
So as not to have to leave her afterwards.
And I prefer thinking about her, because I'm a little afraid of
   her as she really is.
I don't really know what I want, and I don't even want to
   know what I want.
All I want is to think her.
I don't ask anything of anyone, not even of her, except to let
   me think.

Fernando Pessoa
July 10,1930
 

The Yellow Curtain, ca. 1893
Edouard Vuillard

Allegretto, ca. 1921
Cleo Damianakes

Cray, ca. 1883-84
William Morris

Back of a Woman, ca. 1857
Shepard Alonzo Mount

Vera Karalli


The Dying Swan (1917)
Yevgeni Bauer

Jupes
René Maltête

Over the snowdrift's hard crust
Into your white, mysterious house,
We walked in tender silence,
Both hushed.
And sweeter to me than all songs sung
Is this dream fulfilled,
The gentle clinking of your spurs
And the swaying of branches we've brushed.

January 1917
Anna Akhmatova

Untitled (Fashion, Paris), 1933
Ilse Bing

At the Milliners, 1882
Edgar Degas

A Study Head, 1900
Eva Watson-Schütze
(from Camera Notes, Vol. 4 No. 3, January 1901)

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964)
Sergei Parajanov

Untitled (Store Window), 1981
Garry Winogrand

New Moon, 1980
Alex Colville

Le Baiser, Paris, 1936
Brassaï

Self-Portrait with Elizabeth, 1921
André Kertész

Femme aux Cartes, 1930
Florence Henri

The Prairie, 1917
Laura Gilpin

American Interior, 1934


Still Life, 1925
Charles Sheeler

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1966)
Jean-Luc Godard

Two Lovers, ca. 1629-30
Riza `Abbasi

Washington, D.C. (A radio is company for this girl in her boardinghouse room), Jan. 1943
Esther Bubley

Untitled, c. 1867
Julia Margaret Cameron

La Collectionneuse (1967)
Eric Rohmer

Landscape, ca. 1835-45
Circle of Carl Rottmann

Woman Holding Hand Drum (postcard)
Nakazawa Hiromitsu, 1874-1964

Amarcord (1973)
Federico Fellini

Day of Wrath (1943)
Carl Theodor Dreyer

The White Sheik (1952)
Federico Fellini

Variety Lights (1950)
Federico Fellini

Window, New York, ca. 1939-45


Window, Bergdorf Goodman, New York, ca. 1939-45


Reflection, Fifty-Seventh Street, New York, ca. 1939-40
Lisette Model

Judit, 1934
Imre Kinszki

Can-Can, Moulin Rouge, Paris, 1931
Ilse Bing

I will root out this day from your memory,
So that your helplessly hazy glance will ask:
Where did I see Persian lilac,
And swallows, and a little wooden house?

Oh, how often you will remember
The sudden anguish of unnamed desire,
And search, in drifting dream towns,
For the street that isn't on the map!

At the sight of every chance letter,
At the sound of a voice from a half-opened door,
You will think: "She herself
Has come to dispel my disbelief."

April 4, 1915
Tsarskoye Selo

Anna Akhmatova

John and Mary (1969)
Peter Yates

Girl of the Bangs-Phelps Family, ca. 1848
Erastus Salisbury Field

Untitled (Elevator), 1981
Garry Winogrand

Portrait of a Lady, ca. 1898
Theodora W. Thayer

Eaton's Neck, Long Island, 1872


Sunset Sky, 1872
John Frederick Kensett

New York City, ca. 1929-39
Walker Evans