Veronika Fuchs

Still Life The backyard foxes are lean this winter, and the birds bright. Most days I can't bring myself to do anything but watch the vixen root for something. A run of good days means I'll spend hours rearranging the pantry, as if preparing to paint a Dutch still life. All that's missing is a milkmaid. Or a dead bird. My dress, wrinkled and sleeveless, is nothing like the sky. The foxes grow thinner, and I wonder whether I should feed them, though I don't really know what they eat. Nights stretch and I sleep little, but it's the days, the sun at four o'clock, that are the most difficult-when the movement of clouds appears full of peril. People once drilled holes into other people's skulls, just to let that darkness out.

M. Cynthia Cheung ♥️

from COMMON DISASTER (Acre Books)

I absolutely love this poem!

@acrebooks.bsky.social

Oof 🖤💙

Tr. by Ulrich Baer

Text: I remember Rodin's exasperation when Francis Jammes repeated Van Tieghem's claim that the seeds of certain flowers had arrived on earth from other stars, trapped inside meteorites. Rodin knew how much we have yet to accomplish here (indeed, what not?!) and very decidedly did not want our curiosity turned beyond and away from what is here. And yet even that is possible: to have the starred skies closely wrapped around one's heart.

And yet even that is possible: to have the starred skies closely wrapped around one's heart.

Rilke, in a letter to Ilse Erdmann, October 1915

This is incredible 💙✨

Picture of a full moon with a halo of light around it. Looks like a pupil with an iris. Silhouettes of trees against a blurred background.

She was watching

November, and I'm leafing through Mary Frances's @maryfrancesness.bsky.social LANDFALL again...

www.metambesen.org/wp-content/u...

It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable force. They say that the novelists never catch it; that it goes hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons. (Jacob's Room, ch. 12)

Thank you, Susan. It is from last year. I enjoyed painting it from a photograph of the trees in the yard.

The wooden surface of the desk, stained with ink and paint, and other marks of use and time

Stories (and histories) on the surface of Virginia Woolf's writing desk, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, 2010

"Whom seeing not, we" clasp - Emily A remnant of a letter to Elizabeth Holland, in the Amherst Emily Dickinson Collection

“It is also November. The noons are more laconic and the sundowns sterner...November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.”

-Emily Dickinson, letter to Elizabeth Holland (Nov 1865)
#everynightapoem #november

“People really understand very little of one another…My Cid looks very hard and straight into my face as if in search of something..like someone who has tumbled off a star. But he is not the one who feel alien—…I think. He lives in a small country of hope, which is his heart.”

Anne Carson

Watercolor painting: autumn trees with yellow, orange, brown, and a few green leaves against a blue sky, seen as if from below

Fall

I really liked its neuroticism, David. Its longing and yearning. It is very poetic, too.

Looking at this work, I thought of a line from Georges Perec's "Eternity" that I read today: "Each instant is persistence and memory"...

🖤💙

"In Syros, you struggled to separate your fantasy of Greece from the Greece around you. Pink dawns, laundry on balconies, and exhaust fumes wrestled with Styx, Lethe, coins on cold tongues."

"strangeness is the true hallmark of beauty, not symmetry," —a beautiful new piece by David Luntz

Elegy BY JOANNA KLINK I saw you fall to the ground. I saw the oaks fall. The clouds collapsed. I saw a wildness twist through your limbs and fly off. The river fell, the grasses fell. The backs of six drowned cattle rose to the surface ice-nothing moved. But a wind touched my ankles when the snow began. You left that night and we stayed, our arms braced with weight. What power there was was over. But I switched on the light by the porch to see if anything was falling-and it fell, a few glints in the air, catching sun although there was no sun, and the long descent over hours, all night, seemed like years, and we buried our faces in what came to rest on the ground or moved our feet over it, effortless, as nothing was in our lives, or ever will be.

Joanna Klink ♥️

Oh!! 🖤

Abstract painting: mostly vertical brushstrokes in shades of dark green, brown, and black. In the center, "something" resembling burning angel wings, casting light around them

Speaking of Rilke, autumns, and paintings (and of Rilke's angels and our desperate moments under black suns), years ago I painted "Rilke's Autumn" and destroyed it shortly afterward.

tr. by Joel Agee

Text: Never have I been so touched and almost gripped by the sight of heather as the other day, when I found these three branches in your dear letter. Since then they are lying in my Book of Images, penetrating it with their strong and serious smell, which is really just the fragrance of autumn earth. But how glorious it is, this fragrance. At no other time, it seems to me, does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more than honeysweet where you feel it is close to touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost, and yet again wind; tar and turpentine and Ceylon tea. Serious and poor like the smell of a begging monk and yet again hearty and resinous like precious incense. And the way ...

An autumn day spent with paintings. It is no surprise that Rilke's words arrived with the night.

"At no other time ...does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; …Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost,"

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne

"Peter Schmidt uses the “strikethrough” as a kind of shadow-writing: his “Encyclopedia of Light” reveals little dark threads of undoing — marks of the second thought that endlessly cancels the first."

A beautiful read with paintings by Joseph Mallord William Turner.

❤️❤️❤️

You might also like the yellow in that Bonnard painting I was looking for, "The Sea Trip" ("The Hahnloser Family"). There's a lot of blue here, and they look wonderful together.

Édouard Vuillard Repast in a Garden, 1898 Oil on cardboard Visual description by National Gallery of Art: Two people, perhaps a woman and man, and a baby sit at a table in a courtyard surrounded by vine-covered walls in this square painting. The scene is loosely painted with visible dabs, dashes, or smudges. The table is to the left of center. The man sits on the far side, to our left, and the woman, who appears to have her brown hair pulled up, sits facing away from us wearing a smoke-gray garment. A child wearing pink and pale blue sits to our right of the woman and seems to raise both arms. The ground is dotted with cream white and fog gray against the brown board on which this was painted. Steps lead up to a building at the back of the courtyard to the left, and the vine-covered wall stretches across the right two-thirds of the background. The artist signed the lower left corner, “E Vuilllard.”

and the afternoon went on forever, and the path to the walled garden went on forever, the repast the Sunday the sunlight burning this leaf then that one,  the wine on the table, burning, the bread, the thudding of the minutes inaudible, of what’s in the minutes,  that greed

Another one by Vuilllard, with an excerpt from Jorie Graham's poem "Before", inspired by the painting.

www.nga.gov/stories/arti...

LINE Orpheus descended. The red ribbon unspooled from his mouth in the darkness. He sang and it fluttered. There were sisters somewhere. They spun, they measured, and they cut but the song continued. A word rings like a struck bell. It ends when it stops ringing. When does a line end? How long is a piece of string? A line ends when it is broken. Theseus descended. He rounded the corners and grazed the margins. He kept going. You can name a tree and tether your tale to the yard. You can enter the labyrinth and pull yourself out with a rope. Theseus killed the Minotaur. According to some, he used his hands. Others say he used a sword. How long is a piece of string? How long is a story or a song? Theseus spooling. A sentence ends with a period but a line continues on. I wouldn't break the line. I was afraid to. Too much was already broken. I lashed the words like pack dogs, each to each, and sledded the frozen lands for yards. I told myself the story of myself. It bounced back. It echoed in the maze and I triangulated. You think the monster is the problem. The problem is the thread. The sentence goes one way, the line goes another. It makes a friction. Dawn breaks. The waves break against the cliffs. A necklace breaks and the opals scatter like rats. You can break a promise, you can break a glass, you can draw a line in the sand or throw a ball of yarn at a kitten yelling Minotaur! Measure measure, cut cut. The sauce breaks. Your heart breaks. The car breaks down by the side of the road and you end up walking home in the dark, exhausted and iambic. I didn't want to risk it. from I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon, 2025)

exhausted and iambic

Richard Siken

Édouard Vuillard Under the Portico, 1899-1900 Oil on board

Édouard Vuillard The Petunia (Le Pétunia), 1889-1890 Oil on board

Édouard Vuillard La conversation, chez les Natanson à Valvins, 1896

Édouard Vuillard Les Ailes au Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, 1894

More yellows and greens from Édouard Vuillard

Édouard Vuillard The Flowered Dress (La robe à ramages), 1891 Oil on canvas

Édouard Vuillard Guelder Roses and the Venus of Milo (Rose guelder e la Venere di Milo), 1905 Oil on cardboard

Édouard Vuillard Madame Hessel At The Milliner (Madame Hessel Chez La Modiste), 1903 Oil on board

Édouard Vuillard Man and Woman beneath a Tree (Homme et femme sous un arbre), 1893 Oil on board

I was looking for Bonnard's painting mentioned in Marguerite Duras's "Practicalities" ("Bonnard") and, of course, the path led me further, to Édouard Vuillard, whose yellows and greens I adore today.

Autumn light

#icm #impressionism #landscapelovers #photography