quotidian

My Wife Wants To Become Part of a Coral Reef

for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

e.e. cummings (1958)

Sextalk

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

Hippolyta
William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream

Dumb Luck + Damn Chance

[Louis] Armstrong was arrested in his early teens for firing a cap pistol in celebration of the Fourth of July. That proved to be providential, because in the segregated boys' home to which he was sent he was taught to play the cornet by Professor Peter Davis.

Astaire (Way To Paradise)

Between 1935 and 1938, because of the influence of one man, five of America's best songwriters wrote 28 songs that collectively stand as a museum exhibit of the form. The writers were Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields, George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin, and the man who elicited this body of work was Fred Astaire.

William Zinsser
Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs
Godine, 2001, p103

Talisman

From the four corners of the earth,
from corners lashed in wind
and bitten with rain and fire,
from places where the winds begin
and fogs are born with mist children,
tall men from tall rocky slopes came
and sleepy men from sleepy valleys,
their women tall, their women sleepy...

Carl Sandburg
The People, Yes (opening)

Excerpt, Different Context

Something else

Hauls me through air——

Sylvia Plath
from "Ariel"

Eternal Weekend

Bless my heart I think about
only you...
You can't get much Higher Ground
than you...
Bless my heart now I've found
you...

Andy Cato
Weekend Players
Higher Ground

Friends

ah, what can one make to absorb the astonishment

A.R. Ammons
from For Emily Wilson (poem)

Regret Is An Essential Component of Happiness

...when our love was new
and each kiss an inspiration
ah but that was long ago...

Mitchell Parish
"Stardust"

Weather Is So Changeable

Carl Orff...scored a surprised hit in Nazi Germany with his cantata Carmina burana. With its exotic percussion writing (modeled on Stravinsky's Les Noces) and its syncopated "bounce," Orff's showpiece was far removed from Hitler's favorite Wagner operas. The review in the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party paper, identified it as "Bavarian Niggermusik." Once the work had demonstrated huge popular appeal, however, Nazi aesthetics were adjusted to accommodate it. By 1944 Goebbels was gushing in his diary that Carmina burana contained "extraordinary beauties."

Alex Ross
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
FSG, 2007, pp319-320