Leaving

To Live in the World

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go


--Mary Oliver

Am Away

Very little posting...am in Barcelona

To Long For..

At Last by Etta James

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,

never be blind or too old to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.

I want to unfold.

No where I wish to stay crooked, bent;

for there I would be dishonest, untrue.

I want my conscience to be true before you;

Rainer Maria Rilke

The Touch of your Lips... Played by Ben Webster...

Farewell my friend

Farewell to my friend, J.W who died today of AIDS.... A brave and courageous life ...
St James Infirmary... Performed by Louis Armstrong

Sleeping at last, the trouble and tumult over,
Sleeping at last, the struggle and horror past,
Cold and white, out of sight of friend and of lover,
Sleeping at last.
Nor more a tired heart downcast or overcast,
No more pangs that wring or shifting fears that hover,
Sleeping at last in a dreamless sleep locked fast.
Fast asleep. Singing birds in their leafy cover
Cannot wake her, nor shake her the gusty blast.
Under the purple thyme and the purple clover
Sleeping at last

-Christina Rossetti

Journey's

In the Wee Small Hours...of the morning... recorded by Frank Sinatra









Clair de Lune... Claude Debussy












A Woman Alone

When she cannot be sure which of two lovers it was with whom she felt this or that moment of pleasure,
of something fiery streaking from head to heels,
the way the white flame of a cascade streaks a mountain side seen from a car across a valley,
the car changing gear, skirting a precipice, climbing . . .
When she can sit or walk for hours after a movie talking earnestly and with bursts of laughter with friends, without worrying that it's late, dinner at midnight,
her time spent without counting the change . . .
When half her bed is covered with books and no one is kept awake by the reading light and she disconnects the phone, to sleep till noon . . .
Then self-pity dries up, a joy untainted by guilt lifts her.
She has fears, but not about loneliness;
fears about how to deal with the aging of her body—
how to deal with photographs and the mirror.
She feels so much younger and more beautiful than the looks.
At her happiest—or even in the midst of some less than joyful hour, sweating patiently through a heatwave in the city or hearing the sparrows at daybreak, dully gray, toneless, the sound of fatigue—
a kind of sober euphoria makes her believe in her future as an old woman, a wanderer seamed and brown,
little luxuries of the middle of life all gone,
watching cities and rivers, people and mountains,without being watched;
not grim nor sad,an old wine drinking woman, who knows the old roads, grass-grown, and laughs to herself . . .
she knows it can't be:that's Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedone by from The Water Babies,
no one can walk the world any more, a world of fumes and decibels.
But she thinks maybe she could get to be tough and wise, some way, anyway.
Now at leasts he is past the time of mourning, now she can say without shame or deceit,
O blessed Solitude

by Denise Levertov


Henry Mancini/Johny Mercer..... Moon River

The We of Me

CON TE PARTIRO... sung by Andrea Bocelli

Funny we know nothing about losing someone

Until they are walking away

Until they are gone

When the void becomes real

When all the silent beauty

Is loud with passing

And all the love songs ever written

Become merely words

Words spoken in haste

Never time to stop and care

No moments to give

Until the moment is passed

--Joanne Dyhrkopp

Listen to Zoot Sims playing Once We Loved...

Passage of time

If I should lose you.... Charlie "Yardbird" Parker

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

But many loved your moments of glad grace

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

From "When You Are Old" by William Butler Yeats

Love to Last

Bill Evans ..Plays for Lovers ..most recordings 1956-62

They are not long,the weeping and the laughter,

Love and Desire and hate:

I think they have to not portion in us after

We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges ofr a while, then closes

Within a dream.

--Ernest Dowson

Looking Back

Spoon's Life Blues---Jimmy Witherspoon

Dear as remembered kisses after death

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned

Oh lips that are for others;deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret

Oh death in Life, the days that are no more

--Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Falling in Love

I'm getting Sentimental


over you--Ella Fitzgerald

Stan Getz--All the things that you are

Chet Baker--How high the Moon

And of Course--- Miles Davis.. My Funny Valentine

Moving On

Someone Else is Steppin In..Buddy Guy

"...these soft

nights hold me like themselves aloft

and I lie without a lover"

--Rainer Maria Rilke, Summer 1909

You Done Tore your Playhouse Down Again...

--King Biscuit Boy (aka Richard Newell)

Longing

Miles Davis--It Never Entered my Mind

I'm a fool to want you-- by Dexter Gordon

Had I known

My longing would be so great

Like a clear mirror

I'd have looked on you-

Not missing a day

Not even an hour

--Lady Otomo of Sakaroue

History

Embraceable You..Chris Botti's version

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead......We are communal histories,

communal books. We are not owned or monogamous
in our taste or experience... -Michael Ondaatje

In a Sentimental Mood--Duke Ellington

Wednesday

Listening to Stanley Turrentines "Since I fell for You"...

The great and incaluclable grace of love which says, "I want you to be" without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation-- Hannah Arendt

Friday Fun

Middle Age Blues by Saffire, Uppity Blues Women...a fun and lively blues tune

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure,

but I don't know many of them

Sylvia Path, from The Bell Jar

Partings

Reconsider Baby by Lowell Fulson

...a whirlwind of passion possessing and tearing at my soul.

It was as if a live coal had been set to burning in my breast.

From The Transformation By Mary Wollenstonecraft Shelley

Musings

John Lee Hooker's Serves you Right to Suffer

And the last perhaps will not return and knows me not, although I burn
And the trees over hang glowingly and I feel no one feeling me
Woman's Lament by Rainer Maria Rilke

Loneliness

Life may be brimming over with experience, but somewhere, deep inside, all of us carry a vast and fruitful loneliness wherever we go. And sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths

-An Interrupted Life, The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-43





"Solitude" by Bille Holiday is a great tune

Dust and Such

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life

-Berthold Auerbach

Etta James "Evening of Love" .... A great way to wash away last weeks dust!

A Time of Mourning

When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds,
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and I am free

-"The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry


I've been listening to some Mississippi John Hurt and Dinah Washington..... or listen to something which soothes you..

Again, please give what you can for those who are in such need and despair...