For Now the Morning Nears....

Within your cells awaken
You children of old years;
Your couches be forsaken,
For now the morning nears.

Your threads of life I'm weaving
Into one mighty whole.
The feuding years are leaving;
Your lives shall be one soul.

Each will in all be dwelling
And all in each one too;One heart in you be swelling,
One breath the whole imbue.

For Herbert

...

Text from Fable's song in Novalis' Henry von Ofterdingen

The Bed that Envelops Him....

Snow is falling, and through the streets, bareheaded, crazy Tiennette is running like a crazy woman. She plays all alone, catches the white flies as they fall in her violet hands, sticks out her tongue to dissolve the light candy she can just taste, and, with the tip of her finger, draws sticks and rings on the bright sheet.

Then the shoes that made her as tall as the roof thatch and dizzied her so come loose. She topples and stays on the ground a long while, making a cross, being good, until her portrait sinks in.

Then she makes herself a snowchild.

His limbs are twisted and shrunken from the cold. His eyes have been gouged out, his nose has one hole to take the place of two, his mouth has no teeth, and his skull has no hair, because hair and teeth are too hard.

“The poor thing!” says Tiennette.

She clasps him to her heart and whistles a lullaby, then, once he starts to melt, she changes him quickly and gives him a maternal roll in the fresh snow so the bed that envelops him will be clean.

...

~ Jules Renard (1864-1910), from "Crazy Tiennette" in The Dark Lantern.

Between Confusedly Tender Skeins...

... gleamings of slowed hands

Meditations have words that are soundless;
How I love to seek them in the silence!
It is necessary only that,
Night should forget itself more fully,
Night should forget itself faster
Among its sparse street lights,
Round the corner
Like a forsaken house...
Should forget itself among the quiet dining
Rooms above you, in the lilac-colored…
That from the tablecloth the trembling
Circle should not let down its yellow
Overflows, and gleamings of slowed hands
Should separate gray threads there,
And that you with anguish should separate
These threads one after the other, should
Separate and afterwards roll them up,
And with lilac openness the needle
Should go after the shining thread…
And then, unconcernedly bright,
With the quiet squeaking of straw
Hinges, carefully pinning the sheets,
There you too, Virtue, should fall sleep
Between confusedly tender skeins

...

~ Text: "The Work Basket" by the Russian poet, Innokenty Annensky (1856-1909)

~ Image from Docks of New York, Joseph von Sternberg, 1928