Joys of Autumn

“There is a harmony in autumn, and a luster in its sky, which through the summer is not heard or seen, as if it could not be, as if it had not been!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ode to Wine

Day-colored wine,
night-colored wine,
wine with purple feet
or wine with topaz blood,
wine,
starry child
of earth,
wine, smooth
as a golden sword,
soft
as lascivious velvet,
wine, spiral-seashelled
and full of wonder,
amorous,
marine;
never has one goblet contained you,
one song, one man,
you are choral, gregarious,
at the least, you must be shared.
At times
you feed on mortal
memories;
your wave carries us
from tomb to tomb,
stonecutter of icy sepulchers,
and we weep
transitory tears;
your
glorious
spring dress
is different,
blood rises through the shoots,
wind incites the day,
nothing is left
of your immutable soul.
Wine
stirs the spring, happiness
bursts through the earth like a plant,
walls crumble,
and rocky cliffs,
chasms close,
as song is born.
A jug of wine, and thou beside me
in the wilderness,
sang the ancient poet.
Let the wine pitcher
add to the kiss of love its own.
My darling, suddenly
the line of your hip
becomes the brimming curve
of the wine goblet,
your breast is the grape cluster,
your nipples are the grapes,
the gleam of spirits lights your hair,
and your navel is a chaste seal
stamped on the vessel of your belly,
your love an inexhaustible
cascade of wine,
light that illuminates my senses,
the earthly splendor of life.
But you are more than love,
the fiery kiss,
the heat of fire,
more than the wine of life;
you are
the community of man,
translucency,
chorus of discipline,
abundance of flowers.
I like on the table,
when we're speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.
Drink it,
and remember in every
drop of gold,
in every topaz glass,
in every purple ladle,
that autumn labored
to fill the vessel with wine;
and in the ritual of his office,
let the simple man remember
to think of the soil and of his duty,
to propagate the canticle of the wine.

Pablo Neruda
Picture was taken in the gardens at Versailles from our March 08 trip.

The Beauty of Flight

“When once you have tasted flight you will always walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward: for there you have been and there you will always be.”

Henry Van Dyke

I know, another gull. I'm sorry. I took this picture in Belmar the same day I was in Asbury Park. I just love the translucence of the gulls feathers.

Common Sense

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”

Buddha

I took this photo yesterday at the Rubin Museum of Art, NYC

Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey!

“The New Jersey character - at least this part of Jersey - is straightforward, plainspoken to the point of bluntness, though not at all unfriendly, ... The humor is deadpan, ironical, playfully depreciating. Affectation is quickly and viscerally registered.”

August Kleinzahler

Sisters

" A sister is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost.”

Marion C. Garretty

Me and my sister Jacquie

Photo from 1966, probably by my dad.