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NEARING AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Pattiann Rogers

Those are my bones rifted

and curled, knees to chin,

among the rocks on the beach,

my hands splayed beneath my skull

in the mud. Those are my rib

bones resting like white sticks

wracked on the bank, laid down,

delivered, rubbed clean

by river and snow.



Ethereal as seedless weeds

in dim sun and frost, I see

my own bones translucent as locust

husks, light as spider bones,

as filled with light as lantern

bones when the candle flames.

And I see my bones, facile,

willing, rolling and clacking,

reveling like broken shells

among themselves in a tumbling surf.



I recognize them, no other's,

raggedly patterned and wrought,

peeled as a skeleton of sycamore

against gray skies, stiff as a fallen

spruce. I watch them floating

at night, identical lake slivers

flush against the same star bones

drifting in scattered pieces above.



Everything I assemble, all

the constructions I have rendered

are the metal and dust of my locked

and storied bones. My bald cranium

shines blind as the moon.




From Eating Bread and Honey, published by Milkweed Editions, 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Pattiann Rogers. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

poppy day

1915

I’ve watched the Seasons passing slow,
so slow,
In the fields between La Bassée and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
August, and yellowing Autumn, so
To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow,
And you’ve been everything.

Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack
In these soul-deadening trenches— pictures, books,
Music, the quiet of an English wood,

Beautiful comrade-looks,
The narrow, bouldered mountain-track,
The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black,
And Peace, and all that’s good.

Robert Graves

easy

Seven White Butterflies

Seven white butterflies
delicate in a hurry look
how they bang the pages
of their wings as they fly

to the fields of mustard yellow
and orange and plain
gold all eternity
is in the moment this is what

Blake said Whitman said such
wisdom in the agitated
motions of the mind seven
dancers floating

even as worms toward
paradise see how they banter
and riot and rise
to the trees flutter

lob their white bodies into
the invisible wind weightless
lacy willing
to deliver themselves unto

the universe now each settles
down on a yellow thumb on a
brassy stem now
all seven are rapidly sipping

from the golden towers who
would have though it could be so easy?

Copyright © 1997 by Mary Oliver

White butterflies are thought to be spirits of the living as well as the dead, and may not be captured - the fragile insect is a symbol of immortality, due to the successive stages of its metamorphose from egg to caterpillar and from cocoon to adult insect. Its graceful fluttering from flower to flower...is easily compared to the fickleness of women who often change lovers (in search of money).1

safety glass

these are kageyama, the stencils with which kimono fabric is made.

this is kimono fabric.

edouard benedictus was a designer of fabric and wallpaper patterns.

his rug designs are of my favorites. here are some. and here is where to get in touch with the arts and crafts home, which grows more comprehensive all the time, with biographies of the artists/craftspeople of the period, and and increasingly wide selection of examples.

he also coordinates a service wherein rugs of distant eras can be woven anew for you. god i wish i was rich.

so why, you might ask, is this post entitled 'safety glass'? In 1903, a French chemist called Edouard Benedictus dropped a glass flask on the floor of his laboratory. The flask shattered but, to Benedictus's surprise, the glass did not fly apart. Rather, the shards and splinters stayed together in the shape of the original flask. The flask had contained a solution of cellulose nitrate. A thin film of this chemical had been left behind in the flask and formed a lining. This lining was strong enough to hold the glass together when it broke. Benedictus kept and labelled the interesting flask. He thought little more of it until a few weeks later, when he read of two accidents in which motorists had crashed and been seriously injured by flying glass. (more)

yup. same guy.