Big Window

Stop

Robert Rauschenberg 1925-2008

(previous posts about RR = here and here)

Green Animals

"It may happen that we do not always want the most beautiful form, but one of our own designing."

        —Shirley Hibberd (qtd. in The Book of Topiary, by Charles H. Curtis)

My Topiary Is a Hedge against Confusion

You have to come at it from a distance,
to walk up close to it to see the animal
is only from a distance:
then to be charmed by it.
The closer you get the more abstract.

        The dog is named for the variegated privet.
Walk away & the wind shakes Spot & the little leaves flicker,
perhaps, as if in happiness,
or, the water off.
It is not giving up anything nor is it
literal to a fault.

The Privacy the Privet Promised

What had seemed headed in one direction took on suddenly,
a life of its own, the one thing forbidden.

The rule of time is you feel yourself growing older.

You see yourself from a distance that keeps getting longer.

There is a Failure in the Topiary

yet here we are in the way the growing season
never lets the ragged ends of things be still.

Something will get us closer & then         Poof!
I think you see me for nearly what I am.

by Michele  Glazer

 

published in American Letters & Commentary
    Number 19: Special Feature: Collaborations

republished by Verse Daily

photo by Vanita via flickr
 

Boredom Produces Nonsense

  Boredom 
  Originally uploaded to flickr by implikacja

Yes, it's moleskine Monday again.  Open up your notebook and write down some noise.

The Edge of Sleep

  The Edge of Sleep 
  Originally uploaded to flickr by Ashψ

Here's something beautiful to accompany Robin Becker's poem.

I like the photographer's comments on the picture: "Sometimes late at night, when you are falling asleep in front of the television, the world slows down and the colours blur. This is what that looks like..."

Great Sleeps I Have Known

Once in a cradle in Norway folded
like Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir
as a ship in full sail transported the dead to Valhalla

Once on a mountain in Taos after making love
in my thirties the decade of turquoise and silver

After your brother walked into the Atlantic
to scatter your mothers ashes his khakis soaked
to the knees his shirtsleeves blowing

At the top of the cottage in a thunderstorm
once or twice each summer covetous of my solitude

Immediately following lunch
against circadian rhythms, once
in a bunk bed in a dormitory in the White Mountains

Once in a hollow tree in Wyoming
A snow squall blew in the guide said tie up your horses

The last night in the Katmandu guest house
where I saw a bird fly from a monk's mouth
a consolidated sleep of East and West

Once on a horsehair mattress two feet thick
I woke up singing
as in the apocryphal story of my birth
at Temple University Hospital

On the mesa with the burrowing owls
on the mesa with the prairie dogs

Willing to be lucky
I ran the perimeter road in my sleep
entrained to the cycles of light and dark
Sometimes my dead sister visited my dreams

Once on the beach in New Jersey
after the turtles deposited their eggs
before my parents grew old, nocturnal

by Robin Becker

From Domain of Perfect Affection © 2006.

Sunny Side Up

The city of Leeuwarden has something new in the town square. If you like your eggs sunny side up and you live in the Netherlands, you're in luck. Dutch artist Henk Hofstra has taken care of everything. In a big way.  His newest art environment is called "Art-Eggcident Leeuwarden."  Each of those eggs is 100 feet wide.

via the Wooster Collective

Frankenstyles

I can't remember how I first landed on the Frankenstyles site, but the quirky, challenging designs of Stephen Kelleher never disappoint.

I Know a Man by Robert Creeley

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,--John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

by Robert Creeley

photo by ___cath via flickr

Airplanes

m a r t a . c o m  -  Check out the gorgeous photography of Catalan artist Marta Barceló.  Breathtaking!

Abandoned Ship, Lisbon

forgotten
Originally uploaded by pedro vidigal

Photo by Pedro Vidigal

Back to WordArt

Remember WordArt, the font font of the 90s? It's back in Back to WordArt. Check out this fun 18 seconds by Berlin-based artist Mike Ruiz, a.k.a. Mikey Awesome. (via  rhizome)