This is from a project based on Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - added after seeing yesterday's post at A Year with Rilke: Birdsong.

You've heard of -

- - - people eating the ears off chocolate Easter bunnies. 

Some context: The duck, squirrel. owl, cat and bear remain intact in a Pacific Grove yard.

Easter in the 40's -

- - - in Lakeside, Ohio.  Mother was so proud of us!

Superman - Favorite story of the day

I love the image of this man flying in the storm and keeping his eyes open to see it all.

from Berger's To the Wedding - (earlier post)

I like quoting ancient verses when the occasion is apt . . . and I listen all day but sometimes I do not know how to fit everything together. When this happens I cling to words or phrases which seem to ring true.

Foreword from Ian McEwan's Black Dogs

and from Franzen on writing what you know:

"What else are you going to write about: The problem is figuring out what you know.

Well, it's been awhile. As someone said, "If it turns out to be not worth doing, I haven't done it."

Cover of book by John Berger

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. Henry David Thoreau

from notes on another book of his. . . bride immediately transformed into a stranger. . . newcomer. . . from over horizon. . . veiled

Beginnings are always delightful; the threshold is the place to pause. Goethe, quoted in:

The book begins:

It is [almost] June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today . . .

If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself . . . Perhaps . . . Maybe the shadows will suffice, the light and the shade . . .

So,

I begin again . . .

on my pile of 'yellowing incompletes'

like those of the 'hesitant intellectual' she described, whose 'years fly by like a day'. . .

Tuesday I was going to say, "Yesterday I had tea and cherry-cheese Danish at Carolyn Berry's. She invited me to see the 'altered' book on Rauschenberg that she had just finished before she sent it off to her agent". This is the fabric cover and another quilt section.

Yesterday I watched the live feed of the Hornby Eagles on WILDEARTH.TV. I was lucky to see the baby fed after one parent returned to the nest and the other flew off. Today the chick is already obviously larger and more active. The other egg will probably not hatch.

The view with coastline and sounds of activity at houses below made it feel like being on the ridge in Big Sur.

The 4th of July rose by the front door is bursting into bloom

LINES

from Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that I'd learned and illustrated years ago -

Praise God for dappled things . . .

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

. . . adazzle dim. . .

and from Emily Dickenson

1129

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies . . .

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind—

Walcott The Prodigal

Be happy; you're writing from the privilege

of all your wits about you in your old age,

under the thorn acacias by the noon sea,

the light on all the places you have painted

and hope to paint with the strenuous accuracy

of joy. ...