dangerous & noble things

Oh My Goodness

Lovely, lovely readers, I've just found forty (40) comments awaiting moderation! I had no idea! My miserable strep throat feels a thousand times better. Thank you, dear people, for such love. I am completely overwhelmed. xxxxx

Amber

It never mattered that there was once a vast grieving:
trees on their hillsides, in their groves, weeping – 
a plastic gold dropping
through seasons and centuries to the ground –
until now.
On this fine September afternoon from which you are absent
I am holding, as if my hand could store it,
an ornament of amber
you once gave me.
Reason says this:
the dead cannot see the living.
The living will never see the dead again.
The clear air we need to find each other in is
gone forever, yet
this resin once
collected seeds, leaves and even small feathers as it fell
and fell
which now in a sunny atmosphere seem as alive as
they ever were
as though the past could be present and memory itself
a Baltic honey –
a chafing at the edges of the seen, a showing-off of just how much
can be kept safe
inside a flawed translucence.

EAVAN BOLAND (2006)

(h/t @kcecelia)

 

Minky's birthday dinner

Beach

From @jorgeiron on Instagram. Wow.

February morning with four-leggeds

Tracy's Marvelous Egyptian Salad

It was my turn to host book club this week, and inspired by  The Yacoubian Building by Alaa-Al-Aswany there was Egyptian food. As is our wont, everyone brings something. There were dates and oranges and baklava-inspired pastries with rosewater, and this marvelous salad from the ever-brilliant Tracy.

Arugula and Fennel Salad for Bumble and the Booklettes
With apologies to Yotam Ottolenghi whose Turkish salad from Plenty inspired this assemblage

Serves 8 Booklettes at dinner

for the salad
7-8 ounces arugula, washed, dried and well-chilled
1 large fennel bulb, sliced thin
8 ounces feta, crumbled into chunks
1 ½ cups freshly toasted almonds, roughly chopped
12-14 dates, pitted and sliced lengthwise into eighths
 

for the dressing
½ cup fruity extra virgin olive oil
¼ cup Meyer lemon juice
Zest of 2 Meyer lemons
1 tsp. honey (more if you’d like it sweeter!)
salt & pepper to taste
 

Prepare the dressing an hour or so before serving by combining the olive oil, lemon zest and juice and honey; add salt and pepper to taste.
 

Prep salad ingredients. When ready to serve, toss arugula and fennel till well incorporated then toss with the dressing, feta, dates and almonds.
 

Serve to smart and generous friends.

Blake

If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.

-- William Blake

Sunday morning, California

Diving into the Wreck

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

-- from "Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich

"The beauty of the world has two edges, 

one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder." 

-- Virginia Woolf


And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
     Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
     That is not it, at all."

-- From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot






 

We Dogs of a Thursday Off

The wine of uncharted days,
Their unsteady stance against the working world,

The intense intoxication of nothing to be done,
A day off,

The dance of the big-hearted dog
In us, freed into a sudden green, an immense field:

Off we go, more run than care, more dance—
If a polka could be done not in a room but straight

Ahead, into the beautiful distance, the booming
Sound of the phonograph weakening, but our legs

Getting stronger with their bounding practice:
This day, that feeling, drunkenness

Born of indecision, lack of focus, but everything
Forgiven: Today is a day exposed for what it is,

A workday suddenly turned over on its back,
Hoping to be rubbed

-- Albert Rios