Lilac Love Quotes

Shazi, I prefer the color blue to any other. The scent of lilacs in your hair is a source of constant torment. I despise figs. Lastly, I will never forget, all the days of my life, the memories of last night— For nothing, not the sun, not the rain, not even the brightest star in the darkest sky, could begin to compare to the wonder of you. Khalid.

You shine like the sun and you move like water. Your eyes are the perfect mix of gray and brown, like fog in the woods, and you smell like lilacs in the summer. I think if you laughed, it would sound like music.

Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportian suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lovers's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favourite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.

retrouvailles, another one of those words that do not translate into English, which means “the happiness of meeting someone you love again after a long time.

And stay, my dear stay... forever, as my quiet song, in my lilac dawn.

Father loved the fact that a lilac only blossoms after a harsh winter.

Love is not something you plan, it just happens.

…quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean "love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, did not come from there

But it’s fitting in a way—Father loved the fact that a lilac only blossoms after a harsh winter.

He moved my hand into his, and as our fingers intertwined, it occurred to me that love wasn’t all that I’d feared it to be. I had imagined that it was a wildfire that incinerated everything in its path. Instead, it felt as ordinary and extraordinary as waking up to a new day.

I wonder if I don't give too much of myself to writing: I am always half where I am; the other half is feeding the furnace, kick-starting the heat of creativity. I am making love with someone but at the same time I'm noticing how this graceful hand across my belly might just fit in with the memory of lilacs in Albuquerque in 1974.

The cracks were there, but I was no longer afraid of them. Instead, they served as a reminder that love wasn’t meant to be a pristine affair. It was meant to be messy and meant to hurt, but it would always mend if it’s true.

When we’re together … it’s as though we are like water in the river, my thoughts flowing through yours, yours through mine. And when we are silent”—a faint smile tugged at his lips—“I forget you are even there sometimes.” “I’m flattered, nauri,” I said drily. “It is the greatest compliment. I dislike being around people for too long. But when I am with you … I never feel the need to be someone I am not.

Sometimes pissing off the people you love is how you do them the most good in the end.

Natasha, in her lilac silk dress trimmed with black lace walked, as women can walk, with the more repose and stateliness the greater the pain and shame in her soul.

You’re you,” he repeats, his eyes full of grief. “You’re the same girl who crashed on this planet with me, who I dragged through forests and over mountains, who climbed through a shipwreck full of bodies to save my life. You’re the same girl I loved, and I love you now.” Stop. Stop. No more. Please. My throat seizes. “I love you, Lilac.” His voice is soft, intent. “I love you, and I should’ve told you before you—

There is only you.” His words caressed me, winding themselves around my soul. “There will only ever be you. I promise, Hyeon-ah.

I miss the floral scent of her hair, the perfume that barely masked the underlying truth of what she was. She was lost time. She smelled of dusty libraries and unwound clocks, salted sand and rain riding on the first rays of dawn. And lilac. When she held me to her, lilac was what I smelled first.

Alive to the loving past She conjures her own. Nothing is wholly lost— Sun on the stone. And lilacs in their splendor Like lost friends Come back through grief to tell her Love never ends.

Life is short, and life is beautiful, and everything is lovely. Love it, embrace it, smell the lilacs, play with the dog, and love endlessly and fiercely with everything you've got. Live without regret.

He stared, a line forming between his brows. Then with a shake of his head, he murmured, “You must have been a general in your past life. A most irritatingly stubborn one.

A doctor without love is like a mechanic.

The warm bittersweet smell of clean Negro welcomed us as we entered the churchyard-Hearts of Love hairdressing mingled with asafoetida, snuff, Hoyt's Cologne, Brown's Mule, peppermint, and lilac talcum.

Off To The Races" My old man is a bad man but I can't deny the way he holds my hand And he grabs me, he has me by my heart He doesn't mind I have a Las Vegas past He doesn't mind I have an LA crass way about me He loves me with every beat of his cocaine heart Swimming pool glimmering darling White bikini off with my red nail polish Watch me in the swimming pool bright blue ripples you Sitting sipping on your black Cristal Oh yeah Light of my life, fire of my loins Be a good baby, do what I want Light of my life, fire of my loins Give me them gold coins, gimme them coins And I'm off to the races, cases of Bacardi chasers Chasing me all over town Cause he knows I'm wasted, facing Time again at Riker's Island and I won't get out Because I'm crazy, baby I need you to come here and save me I'm your little scarlet, starlet singing in the garden Kiss me on my open mouth Ready for you My old man is a tough man but He's got a soul as sweet as blood red jam And he shows me, he knows me Every inch of my tar black soul He doesn't mind I have a flat broke down life In fact he says he thinks it's why he might like about me Admires me, the way I roll like a Rolling Stone Likes to watch me in the glass room bathroom, Chateau Marmont Slippin' on my red dress, puttin' on my makeup Glass film, perfume, cognac, lilac Fumes, says it feels like heaven to him Light of his life, fire of his loins Keep me forever, tell me you own me Light of your life, fire of your loins Tell me you own me, gimme them coins And I'm off to the races, cases of Bacardi chasers Chasing me all over town Cause he knows I'm wasted, facing Time again at Riker's Island and I won't get out Because I'm crazy, baby I need you to come here and save me I'm your little scarlet, starlet singing in the garden Kiss me on my open mouth Now I'm off to the races, laces Leather on my waist is tight and I am fallin' down I can see your face is shameless, Cipriani's basement Love you but I'm going down God I'm so crazy, baby, I'm sorry that I'm misbehaving I'm your little harlot, starlet, Queen of Coney Island Raising hell all over town Sorry 'bout it My old man is a thief and I'm gonna stay and pray with him 'til the end But I trust in the decision of the Lord to watch over us Take him when he may, if he may I'm not afraid to say that I'd die without him Who else is gonna put up with me this way? I need you, I breathe you, I never leave you They would rue the day I was alone without you You're lying with your gold chain on, cigar hanging from your lips I said "Hon' you never looked so beautiful as you do now, my man." And we're off to the races, places Ready, set the gate is down and now we're goin' in To Las Vegas chaos, Casino Oasis, honey it is time to spin Boy you're so crazy, baby, I love you forever not maybe You are my one true love, you are my one true love You are my one true love

That’s what poems are for, unlivable love." epigraph to “In Lilac-Light

Take me away - to a garden of flowers; a scented reality with lilac showers.

Love isn’t an illusion that requires silence to maintain. It only needs our memory of what it was like without each other.

As the cab drove off, I caught a glimpse of Paul in the crowd and felt a rush of retrouvailles, another one of those words that do not translate into English, which means “the happiness of meeting someone you love again after a long time.” I

Quite simply, I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later – because I did not belong there, did not come from there – but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month.

Caroline wiped her cheek with the back of her gardening glove, leaving a dark smudge below one eye, then pulled off her gloves. 'But it's fitting in a way - Father loved the fact that a lilac only blossoms after a harsh winter.' Caroline reached over and smoothed the hair back from my brow with a light touch. How many times had my mother done that? 'It's a miracle all of this beauty emerges after such hardship, don't you think?

Lilac fiercely battled and fought off the demons that were on a mission to diminish her inner light, to the point of exhaustion, preventing the negative energy from dragging her and her sister into the dark abyss.

She came upon a bankside of lavender crocuses. The sun was on them for the moment, and they were opened flat, great five-pointed, seven-pointed lilac stars, with burning centres, burning with a strange lavender flame, as she had seen some metal burn lilac-flamed in the laboratory of the hospital at Islington. All down and oak-dry bankside they burned their great exposed stars. And she felt like going down on her knees and bending her forehead to the earth in an oriental submission, they were so royal, so lovely, so supreme. She came again to them in the morning, when the sky was grey, and they were closed, sharp clubs, wonderfully fragile on their stems of sap, among leaves and old grass and wild periwinkle. They had wonderful dark stripes running up their cheeks, the crocuses, like the clear proud stripes on a badger’s face, or on some proud cat. She took a handful of the sappy, shut, striped flames. In her room they opened into a grand bowl of lilac fire.

In the age of social media, you weren’t angry or grieving unless you posted about it online. Our instincts dictated we run to strangers on the internet the moment we experience pain, to tell the world how deeply gutted we are over the loss of our loved ones—as if the multitude of absentminded apologies and offers of prayers would actually mend the rip.

This world is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and the people in it would rather you be miserable as long as they’re comfortable. Why not carve out our own piece and be free to love how we choose?

Hmm, What did I love? I think all the scents. Mama's lilac trees, and the wild iris in the fields, and rain on the breeze on a hot day. Apple and pear blossoms. The hay just cut. The mix of odors in the barn when the sunlight was shafting through the cracks in the boards, heating everything up.

As Lilac found herself in the circle of love with her mother, Jasmine, Violet, Rose, Liz, and Jo, she could not help but feel the power of her divine feminine love for her soul tribe. It was so electrifying; she felt her heart was going to burst out of her chest into a million little lightning bolts.

I wonder if you know just what it means to pious?" "Goin' to church, and readin' the Bible, and sayin' prayers and hymns, ain't it?" "Those things are a part of it; but being kind and cheerful, doing one's duty, helping others, and loving God, is the best way to show that are pious in the true sense of the word.

and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower-roses, carnations, irises, lilac-glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!

A little sacrifice, he thought, just a little sacrifice. For this will calm her, a hug, a kiss, calm caresses. She doesn’t want anything more. And even if she did, what of it? For a little sacrifice, a very little sacrifice, is beautiful and worth… Were she to want more… It would calm her. A quiet, calm, gentle act of love. And I… Why, it doesn’t matter, because Essi smells of verbena, not lilac and gooseberry, doesn’t have cool, electrifying skin. Essi’s hair is not a black tornado of gleaming curls, Essi’s eyes are gorgeous, soft, warm and cornflower blue; they don’t blaze with a cold, unemotional, deep violet. Essi will fall asleep afterwards, turn her head away, open her mouth slightly, Essi will not smile in triumph. For Essi… Essi is not Yennefer.

Strange to think of a form of love going extinct, like a carrier pigeon, a rare tortoise, a lilac or apple whose seeds are not to be found anymore, the scent and taste of the thing long lost, never to be touched again.

She died." I had to prompt him. "Soon after?" "In the early hours of February the nineteenth, 1916." I tried to see the expression on his face, but it was too dark. "There was a typhoid epidemic. She was working in a hospital." "Poor girl." "All past. All under the sea." "You make it seem present." "I do not wish to make you sad." "The scent of lilac." "Old man's sentiment. Forgive me." There was a silence between us. He was staring into the night. The bat flitted so low that I saw its silhouette for a brief moment against the Milky Way. "Is this why you never married?" "The dead live." The blackness of the trees. I listened for footsteps, but none came. A suspension. "How do they live?" And yet again he let the silence come, as if the silence would answer my questions better than he could himself; but just when I had decided he would not answer, he spoke. "By love.

The Landscape" I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love is no longer those lilacs and roses whose breath filled the broad woods, where the sail of a flame lay at the end of each arrow-straight path. I dreamt of loving. The dream remains, but love is no longer that storm whose white nerve sparked the castle towers, or left the mind unrhymed, or flared an instant, just where the road forked. It is the star struck under my heel in the night. It is the vvord no book on earth defines. It is the foam on the wave, the cloud in the sky. As they age, all things grow rigid and bright. The streets fall nameless, and the knots untie. Now, with this landscape, I fix; I shine.

This was the reason for the spiritual attacks Lilac had experienced throughout her life, and she instinctually knew she would continue to be a target for the sinister energy forces that had yet to fulfill their destructive mission.

Of course to one so modern as I am, `Enfant de mon siècle,’ merely to look at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose. It has always been so with me from my boyhood. There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer. Like Gautier, I have always been one of those ‘pour qui le monde visible existe.

If you don’t want your life ruined, I had better not see you lurking around a crime scene again.” A frown drifted across my brows. I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Of course,” I whispered back. “I highly doubt our paths will ever cross again.

Instructions for Dad. I don't want to go into a fridge at an undertaker's. I want you to keep me at home until the funeral. Please can someone sit with me in case I got lonely? I promise not to scare you. I want to be buried in my butterfly dress, my lilac bra and knicker set and my black zip boots (all still in the suitcase that I packed for Sicily). I also want to wear the bracelet Adam gave me. Don't put make-up on me. It looks stupid on dead people. I do NOT want to be cremated. Cremations pollute the atmosphere with dioxins,k hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. They also have those spooky curtains in crematoriums. I want a biodegradable willow coffin and a woodland burial. The people at the Natural Death Centre helped me pick a site not for from where we live, and they'll help you with all the arrangements. I want a native tree planted on or near my grave. I'd like an oak, but I don't mind a sweet chestnut or even a willow. I want a wooden plaque with my name on. I want wild plants and flowers growing on my grave. I want the service to be simple. Tell Zoey to bring Lauren (if she's born by then). Invite Philippa and her husband Andy (if he wants to come), also James from the hospital (though he might be busy). I don't want anyone who doesn't know my saying anything about me. THe Natural Death Centre people will stay with you, but should also stay out of it. I want the people I love to get up and speak about me, and even if you cry it'll be OK. I want you to say honest things. Say I was a monster if you like, say how I made you all run around after me. If you can think of anything good, say that too! Write it down first, because apparently people often forget what they mean to say at funerals. Don't under any circumstances read that poem by Auden. It's been done to death (ha, ha) and it's too sad. Get someone to read Sonnet 12 by Shakespeare. Music- "Blackbird" by the Beatles. "Plainsong" by The Cure. "Live Like You Were Dying" by Tim McGraw. "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" by Sufian Stevens. There may not be time for all of them, but make sure you play the last one. Zoey helped me choose them and she's got them all on her iPod (it's got speakers if you need to borrow it). Afterwards, go to a pub for lunch. I've got £260 in my savings account and I really want you to use it for that. Really, I mean it-lunch is on me. Make sure you have pudding-sticky toffee, chocolate fudge cake, ice-cream sundae, something really bad for you. Get drunk too if you like (but don't scare Cal). Spend all the money. And after that, when days have gone by, keep an eye out for me. I might write on the steam in the mirror when you're having a bath, or play with the leaves on the apple tree when you're out in the garden. I might slip into a dream. Visit my grave when you can, but don't kick yourself if you can't, or if you move house and it's suddenly too far away. It looks pretty there in the summer (check out the website). You could bring a picnic and sit with me. I'd like that. OK. That's it. I love you. Tessa xxx

Lilac intrinsically knew that she was about to be catapulted into an unknown event; however, she could not rationalize this instinct with her analytical mind. She was feeling discombobulated and confused, stuck between levels of consciousness and her perceived dimensional reality.

Lilac was compelled to battle and overcome the evil in front of her so that Dahmien could be metamorphosed back to his divine spiritual wholeness. She was determined to combat his demons with pure, unconditional love to save her family from further torment and to end the ancestral bloodline curse once and for all.

Vanilla lily Meaning: Ambassador of love Sowerbaea juncea | Eastern Australia Perennial with edible roots found in eucalyptus forests, woodlands, heaths, and sub-alpine meadows. Grass-like leaves have a strong scent of vanilla. Flowers are pink-lilac to white, papery, with sweet vanilla perfume. Resprouts after fire.

Lilac fell in love with the village of Positano. It had such incredible healing energy and positive vibes. The ambiance there moved her, and she understood why she had been receiving messages from the universe to come to this magical place. She sensed an imminent divine intervention but didn’t realize its magnitude at the time.

Lose Yourself—Eminem Monsters—Shinedown Dear God—XTC Down with the Sickness—Disturbed Love and War—Fleurie Headstrong—Trapt I Want It That Way—Backstreet Boys Sober—Tool Angels Fall—Breaking Benjamin Black is the Soul—Korn Polyamorous—Breaking Benjamin Best Thing I Never Had—Beyoncé Bed of Lies—Nicki Minaj ft Skylar Grey Apologize—Timbaland ft OneRepublic Spastik—Plastikman Basiel—Amelie Lens Oh Bondage! Up Yours!—X Ray Spex Open Your Eyes—Disturbed Bring Me to Life—Evanescence So What—Pink Light My Fire—The Doors

Not to waste the spring I threw down everything, And ran into the open world To sing what I could sing... To dance what I could dance! And join with everyone! I wandered with a reckless heart beneath the newborn sun. First stepping through the blushing dawn, I crossed beneath a garden bower, counting every hermit thrush, counting every hour. When morning's light was ripe at last, I stumbled on with reckless feet; and found two nymphs engaged in play, approaching them stirred no retreat. With naked skin, their weaving hands, in form akin to Calliope's maids, shook winter currents from their hair to weave within them vernal braids. I grabbed the first, who seemed the stronger by her soft and dewy leg, and swore blind eyes, Lest I find I, before Diana, a hunted stag. But the nymphs they laughed, and shook their heads. and begged I drop beseeching hands. For one was no goddess, the other no huntress, merely two girls at play in the early day. "Please come to us, with unblinded eyes, and raise your ready lips. We will wash your mouth with watery sighs, weave you springtime with our fingertips." So the nymphs they spoke, we kissed and laid, by noontime's hour, our love was made, Like braided chains of crocus stems, We lay entwined, I laid with them, Our breath, one glassy, tideless sea, Our bodies draping wearily. We slept, I slept so lucidly, with hopes to stay this memory. I woke in dusty afternoon, Alone, the nymphs had left too soon, I searched where perched upon my knees Heard only larks' songs in the trees. "Be you, the larks, my far-flung maids? With lilac feet and branchlike braids... Who sing sweet odes to my elation, in your larking exaltation!" With these, my clumsy, carefree words, The birds they stirred and flew away, "Be I, poor Actaeon," I cried, "Be dead… Before they, like Hippodamia, be gone astray!" Yet these words, too late, remained unheard, By lark, that parting, morning bird. I looked upon its parting flight, and smelled the coming of the night; desirous, I gazed upon its jaunt, as Leander gazes Hellespont. Now the hour was ripe and dark, sensuous memories of sunlight past, I stood alone in garden bowers and asked the value of my hours. Time was spent or time was tossed, Life was loved and life was lost. I kissed the flesh of tender girls, I heard the songs of vernal birds. I gazed upon the blushing light, aware of day before the night. So let me ask and hear a thought: Did I live the spring I’d sought? It's true in joy, I walked along, took part in dance, and sang the song. and never tried to bind an hour to my borrowed garden bower; nor did I once entreat a day to slumber at my feet. Yet days aren't lulled by lyric song, like morning birds they pass along, o'er crests of trees, to none belong; o'er crests of trees of drying dew, their larking flight, my hands, eschew Thus I'll say it once and true… From all that I saw, and everywhere I wandered, I learned that time cannot be spent, It only can be squandered.

What will I taste like?" I asked. He inhaled deeply at the base of my throat. "Sweet and pure," he answered, "like white lilacs.

The strong floral fragrance was sickening, suffocating, and threatened to snuff out any lingering remainder of fragile lilac—of the mother she’d loved so, so much.

Don’t be afraid of my wrath,” I say against her skin and I take a steadier grip on her hair, watching her eyes flare when I shove her neck to the side. “Or my love.

She smells like the lilacs that grow down by the lake, and she feels like heaven. She feels like home. She feels like she’s finally mine.

There is a secret language in every kiss that brings us into the light, every kiss is a history within itself

Lotus a star of detachment sultry feverishness of a tawdry universe incense of rejected poems lie in the void of me a book of something else a book of nothing else

What embraces, in which the lilacs were crushed between them! What ardent kisses! What pink flushes of happiness mounting the cheeks of the two women!

Love isn't an illusion that requires silence to maintain. It only needs out memory of what it was like without each other.

The quiz said you would feel a click like the sound of a compact if you were in love, and I felt that click every time I saw Pietrik.

The hotel was quaint, and their room had a little balcony over an atrium, which seemingly was home to several stray cats and had the stench of stale urine. Looking down, Lilac felt faint. The hairs on the back of her neck were erect. Sensing a haunting presence in the atrium below her, she quickly stepped back inside and closed the balcony windows to shut out the unwelcoming energy.

I loved my bedroom... the vanity with the warped mirror, the squat chairs without armrests, the elaborate, oriental dressing screen. I loved curving my body into the velvet sofa, books piled at my feet, the dusty, floor-length curtains pushed back from the windows so I could see the sky. At night the purple-fringed lampshades turned the light a hue somewhere between lilac and dusky plum.

As the lilac-scented breeze carries the memories...there remains the lingering reminder of the times we hold in deep...for to love deeply and live deeply.... is to smell the fragrance of life.....

Sometimes I struggle. Sometimes I falter. Sometimes I live in gray. But always I remember the yarrow you’ve grown in the spaces of my rib cage. I now love with roses from my heart, with lilacs from my mouth.

You plot, daily. Face down circumstance. Measure out your life with...not coffee spoons--pills. Line them up with breakfast, lunch, supper. Never mind mermaids, and lilacs in bloom, and all that stuff. He hadn't a clue.

Mira was abruptly awakened by the slamming of the front door when she realized that Lilac was sleeping beside her. She quickly moved Lilac’s arm and went to see what had caused the noise. As she reached the front hall, she recognized the shadow of a man sitting on her sofa. A bolt of paralyzing fear shot right through her body. She was stunned to see Dragan staring at her; his eyes were cold and illuminating in the darkness of the room.

and a heart that throbs most queerly. I’m queer for other queers, queer for their shapes and colors and sizes, queer for their tastes. I’m queer for the ruthless sea. I’m queer for all the little queer creatures in the tide pools. I’m queer for the light when it breaks the horizon and queer for it when it sinks behind the trees. I’m plain queer for these people and queer for this world. I’m downright queer in love with this wreck of a world, queer in love with love itself—love’s always queer, always arriving in our hearts from queer nowheres, queering everything—and there we are; wide awake all night, queer as queer can be; queer orphans, queer widows, queer boys, and queer girls; sorrel girls queer for ivory boys, daffodil boys queer for lilac girls; carmine girls queer for sable girls, cinnamon boys so very queer for boys of bluest milk. Wicked shepherds! Burn me at the stake and hang me from a tree. Clap me in the stocks; send me down the mine; set me in the burning fields. But I am queer. And I say, Here is water, bread, a dull penny. Here’re my old shirt, my plane and hammer, a roof I’ll help you raise above your head. Here is my queer old body, in a barn, behind a hedge, beneath a shadow, on a bare pallet—

Lilac Wine" I lost myself on a cool damp night Gave myself in that misty light Was hypnotized by a strange delight Under a lilac tree I made wine from the lilac tree Put my heart in its recipe It makes me see what I want to see... And be what I want to be When I think more than I want to think Do things I never should do I drink much more that I ought to drink Because I brings me back you... Lilac wine is sweet and heady, like my love Lilac wine, I feel unsteady, like my love Listen to me... I cannot see clearly Isn't that she coming to me nearly here? Lilac wine is sweet and heady where's my love? Lilac wine, I feel unsteady, where's my love? Listen to me, why is everything so hazy? Isn't that she, or am I just going crazy, dear? Lilac Wine, I feel unready for my love...

When you were a child planting lilacs here with your mother, did you imagine the same honeyed scent, eight years later, waking someone like me in this house... or that you would finally show me hot to fall in love with the time on my hands, to plant flowers to outlive me?

O were my love yon Lilac fair, Wi' purple blossoms to the Spring, And I, a bird to shelter there, When wearied on my little wing! How I wad mourn when it was torn By Autumn wild, and Winter rude! But I wad sing on wanton wing, When youthfu' May its bloom renew'd. O gin my love were yon red rose, That grows upon the castle wa'; And I myself a drap o' dew, Into her bonie breast to fa'! O there, beyond expression blest, I'd feast on beauty a' the night; Seal'd on her silk-saft faulds to rest, Till fley'd awa by Phoebus' light!

The entirety of your existence is but a breath an empty empyrean of grace without favor love is agonizingly the only way to actually be yourself if you’d actually call my name I will call you without shame to know me without blame you shall be called by the ocean’s godly frame

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night, I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, And thought of him I love.

At first Alexander could not believe it was his Tania. He blinked and tried to refocus his eyes. She was walking around the table, gesturing, showing, leaning forward, bending over. At one point she straightened out and wiped her forehead. She was wearing a short-sleeved yellow peasant dress. She was barefoot, and her slender legs were exposed above her knee. Her bare arms were lightly tanned. Her blonde hair looked bleached by the sun and was parted into two shoulder-length braids tucked behind her ears. Even from a distance he could see the summer freckles on her nose. She was achingly beautiful. And alive. Alexander closed his eyes, then opened them again. She was still there, bending over the boy’s work. She said something, everyone laughed loudly, and Alexander watched as the boy’s arm touched Tatiana’s back. Tatiana smiled. Her white teeth sparkled like the rest of her. Alexander didn’t know what to do. She was alive, that was obvious. Then why hadn’t she written him? And where was Dasha? Alexander couldn’t very well continue to stand under a lilac tree. He went back out onto the main road, took a deep breath, stubbed out his cigarette, and walked toward the square, never taking his eyes off her braids. His heart was thundering in his chest, as if he were going into battle. Tatiana looked up, saw him, and covered her face with her hands. Alexander watched everyone get up and rush to her, the old ladies showing unexpected agility and speed. She pushed them all away, pushed the table away, pushed the bench away, and ran to him. Alexander was paralyzed by his emotion. He wanted to smile, but he thought any second he was going to fall to his knees and cry. He dropped all his gear, including his rifle. God, he thought, in a second I’m going to feel her. And that’s when he smiled. Tatiana sprang into his open arms, and Alexander, lifting her off her feet with the force of his embrace, couldn’t hug her tight enough, couldn’t breathe in enough of her. She flung her arms around his neck, burying her face in his bearded cheek. Dry sobs racked her entire body. She was heavier than the last time he felt her in all her clothes as he lifted her into the Lake Ladoga truck. She, with her boots, her clothes, coats, and coverings, had not weighed what she weighed now. She smelled incredible. She smelled of soap and sunshine and caramelized sugar. She felt incredible. Holding her to him, Alexander rubbed his face into her braids, murmuring a few pointless words. “Shh, shh…come on, now, shh, Tatia. Please…” His voice broke. “Oh, Alexander,” Tatiana said softly into his neck. She was clutching the back of his head. “You’re alive. Thank God.” “Oh, Tatiana,” Alexander said, hugging her tighter, if that were possible, his arms swaddling her summer body. “You’re alive. Thank God.” His hands ran up to her neck and down to the small of her back. Her dress was made of very thin cotton. He could almost feel her skin through it. She felt very soft. Finally he let her feet touch the ground. Tatiana looked up at him. His hands remained around her little waist. He wasn’t letting go of her. Was she always this tiny, standing barefoot in front of him? “I like your beard,” Tatiana said, smiling shyly and touching his face. “I love your hair,” Alexander said, pulling on a braid and smiling back. “You’re messy…” He looked her over. “And you’re stunning.” He could not take his eyes off her glorious, eager, vivid lips. They were the color of July tomatoes— He bent to her—

Poem: Roses And Rue (To L. L.) Could we dig up this long-buried treasure, Were it worth the pleasure, We never could learn love's song, We are parted too long. Could the passionate past that is fled Call back its dead, Could we live it all over again, Were it worth the pain! I remember we used to meet By an ivied seat, And you warbled each pretty word With the air of a bird; And your voice had a quaver in it, Just like a linnet, And shook, as the blackbird's throat With its last big note; And your eyes, they were green and grey Like an April day, But lit into amethyst When I stooped and kissed; And your mouth, it would never smile For a long, long while, Then it rippled all over with laughter Five minutes after. You were always afraid of a shower, Just like a flower: I remember you started and ran When the rain began. I remember I never could catch you, For no one could match you, You had wonderful, luminous, fleet, Little wings to your feet. I remember your hair - did I tie it? For it always ran riot - Like a tangled sunbeam of gold: These things are old. I remember so well the room, And the lilac bloom That beat at the dripping pane In the warm June rain; And the colour of your gown, It was amber-brown, And two yellow satin bows From your shoulders rose. And the handkerchief of French lace Which you held to your face - Had a small tear left a stain? Or was it the rain? On your hand as it waved adieu There were veins of blue; In your voice as it said good-bye Was a petulant cry, 'You have only wasted your life.' (Ah, that was the knife!) When I rushed through the garden gate It was all too late. Could we live it over again, Were it worth the pain, Could the passionate past that is fled Call back its dead! Well, if my heart must break, Dear love, for your sake, It will break in music, I know, Poets' hearts break so. But strange that I was not told That the brain can hold In a tiny ivory cell God's heaven and hell.

FUCK There are people who will tell you that using the word fuck in a poem indicates a serious lapse of taste, or imagination, or both. It’s vulgar, indecorous, an obscenity that crashes down like an anvil falling through a skylight to land on a restaurant table, on the white linen, the cut-glass vase of lilacs. But if you were sitting over coffee when the metal hit your saucer like a missile, wouldn’t that be the first thing you’d say? Wouldn’t you leap back shouting, or at least thinking it, over and over, bell-note riotously clanging in the church of your brain while the solicitous waiter led you away, wouldn’t you prop your shaking elbows on the bar and order your first drink in months, telling yourself you were lucky to be alive? And if you wouldn’t say anything but Mercy or Oh my or Land sakes, well then I don’t want to know you anyway and I don’t give a fuck what you think of my poem. The world is divided into those whose opinions matter and those who will never have a clue, and if you knew which one you were I could talk to you, and tell you that sometimes there’s only one word that means what you need it to mean, the way there’s only one person when you first fall in love, or one infant’s cry that calls forth the burning milk, one name that you pray to when prayer is what’s left to you. I’m saying in the beginning was the word and it was good, it meant one human entering another and it’s still what I love, the word made flesh. Fuck me, I say to the one whose lovely body I want close, and as we fuck I know it’s holy, a psalm, a hymn, a hammer ringing down on an anvil, forging a whole new world.

But why didn't Gram tell us our mother wore a perfume that smelled like sunshine? That she slept in the garden in the springtime? That she made pesto with walnuts? why did she keep this real-life mother from us? But as soon as I ask the question, I know the answer, because suddenly there is not blood pumping in my veins, coursing all throughout my body, but longing for a mother who loves lilacs. Longing like I've never had for the Paige walker who wanders that world. That Paige Walker never made me feel like a daughter, but a mother who boils water for pasta does. Except don't you need to be claimed to be a daughter? Don't you need to be loved?

...,for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. A nostalgic list, but then, of course, where could one find a more nostalgic subject?

Every generation of children instinctively nests itself in nature, no matter matter how tiny a scrap of it they can grasp. In a tale of one city child, the poet Audre Lord remembers picking tufts of grass which crept up through the paving stones in New York City and giving them as bouquets to her mother. It is a tale of two necessities. The grass must grow, no matter the concrete suppressing it. The child must find her way to the green, no matter the edifice which would crush it. "The Maori word for placenta is the same word for land, so at birth the placenta is buried, put back in the mothering earth. A Hindu baby may receive the sun-showing rite surya-darsana when, with conch shells ringing to the skies, the child is introduced to the sun. A newborn child of the Tonga people 'meets' the moon, dipped in the ocean of Kosi Bay in KwaZulu-Natal. Among some of the tribes of India, the qualities of different aspects of nature are invoked to bless the child, so he or she may have the characteristics of earth, sky and wind, of birds and animals, right down to the earthworm. Nothing is unbelonging to the child. "'My oldest memories have the flavor of earth,' wrote Frederico García Lorca. In the traditions of the Australian deserts, even from its time in the womb, the baby is catscradled in kinship with the world. Born into a sandy hollow, it is cleaned with sand and 'smoked' by fire, and everything -- insects, birds, plants, and animals -- is named to the child, who is told not only what everything is called but also the relationship between the child and each creature. Story and song weave the child into the subtle world of the Dreaming, the nested knowledge of how the child belongs. "The threads which tie the child to the land include its conception site and the significant places of the Dreaming inherited through its parents. Introduced to creatures and land features as to relations, the child is folded into the land, wrapped into country, and the stories press on the child's mind like the making of felt -- soft and often -- storytelling until the feeling of the story of the country is impressed into the landscape of the child's mind. "That the juggernaut of ants belongs to a child, belligerently following its own trail. That the twitch of an animal's tail is part of a child's own tale or storyline, once and now again. That on the papery bark of a tree may be written the songline of a child's name. That the prickles of a thornbush may have dynamic relevance to conscience. That a damp hollow by the riverbank is not an occasional place to visit but a permanent part of who you are. This is the beginning of belonging, the beginning of love. "In the art and myth of Indigenous Australia, the Ancestors seeded the country with its children, so the shimmering, pouring, circling, wheeling, spinning land is lit up with them, cartwheeling into life.... "The human heart's love for nature cannot ultimately be concreted over. Like Audre Lord's tufts of grass, will crack apart paving stones to grasp the sun. Children know they are made of the same stuff as the grass, as Walt Whitman describes nature creating the child who becomes what he sees: There was a child went forth every day And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became... The early lilacs became part of this child... And the song of the phoebe-bird... In Australia, people may talk of the child's conception site as the origin of their selfhood and their picture of themselves. As Whitman wrote of the child becoming aspects of the land, so in Northern Queensland a Kunjen elder describes the conception site as 'the home place for your image.' Land can make someone who they are, giving them fragments of themselves.

Do you believe in love? Do you believe in hearts of craft, and the shake of the holiness of sorrow and in death you’ll be surprised! do you believe in love? do you believe in truth? do you believe in giving women a heart that is wowed? do you believe in love? do you believe in God? do you believe in hope? do you believe in stars? do you believe in love? do you believe in you? do you believe in life? do you believe in love’s noun?

Lilac. Love smells like lilac. Love is lilac. My head may have forgotten that field, but my heart hadn’t. It had been trying to tell me all along. I’d found my haven all over again in three broken rock gods. When the world wrote off my pain, I could run to them and forget. They’d be my shelter, my peace, and my solace. I could sing, I could sleep, I could laugh, I could cry. In their arms, I could just be. All I needed to know was why they weren’t here now.

Savannah, darlin’?” “Yes, Mama. Come in.” Her mother opened the door a crack, then slipped into the room, carrying the largest, most extravagant bouquet of wildflowers Savannah had ever seen. Wildflowers that smelled of lilac and honeysuckle and the outdoors. She breathed deeply and sighed, looking at her mother in question. “Asher Lee,” she said, “is downstairs.” Savannah felt her mouth tilt up into an involuntary smile and her eyes flood with tears. Her mother set the bouquet on her vanity and put her arm around Savannah. “Whatever he did, he’s awful sorry, button.” “He yelled at me and made me cry.” “Guessing he didn’t mean whatever it is he said.” “He thinks I want him to change.” “Well, of course you do,” said her mother matter-of-factly, swiping at Savannah’s tears with the corner of her sunflower apron. “We all want to change the men we love. Leave our mark on them.” “Oh, I don’t lov—” “Of course you don’t. I was just makin’ conversation.

Oh, it was beautiful to stand at that open window in the freshness, listening to the robin on the bare lilac bush a few yards away, to the quarrelling of the impudent sparrows on the path below, to the wind in the branches of the trees, to all the happy morning sounds of nature. A joyous feeling took possession of her heart, a sudden overpowering delight in what are called common things — mere earth, sky, sun, and wind. How lovely life was on such a morning, in such a clean, rain-washed, wind-scoured world.

But I love you - " "Love your daughter. If you don't, I'll have given you up for nothing. So act if you have to, and soon you'll find you mean it." I touched his sleeve. "It's not that hard. Just be there. When she wakes in the night afraid. If she stumbles at school." "Rena doesn't want me there - " "Your daughter does. She wants you to teach her to sail a boat, show her off at the park. You don't know how powerful your love is, Paul. Without it she'll fall for the first boy who says he loves her, and he'll shatter her for good.

I'm downright queer in love with this wreck of a world, queer in love with love itself—love's always queer, always arriving in our hearts from queer nowheres, queering everything—and there we are; wide awake all night, queer as queer can be; queer orphans queer widows, queer boys, and queer girls; sorrel girls queer for ivory boys, daffodil boys queer for lilac girls; carmine girls queer for sable girls, cinnamon boys so very queer for boys of bluest milk. Wicked shepherds! Burn me at the stake and hang me from a tree. Clap me in the stocks; send me down the mine; set me in the burning fields. But I am queer.

A Letter To Say, "I'll See You Later" I remember just like it was yesterday the grapevine, clothesline, lilacs and peonies. I remember the secret hiding place for 50-cent pieces. I remember just like it was yesterday the color wheel Christmas Tree, The Honeymooner’s, The Dukes of Hazzard and Jeopardy! I remember just like it was yesterday the house was full of children, but I was your only and your favorite. You always made time for me, even when I deserved the fly swatter. I remember just like it was yesterday falling asleep to the scent of Dove soap on your pillow, you lying for me so I wouldn’t be abused again. I remember just like it was yesterday your big “Black Cat” and the late, dark nights driving to IFP and knowing there was “No Place Like Home.” I remember just like it was yesterday the “horns” in your ‘do and the smell of Raffinee wafting through the house and Listerine in the bathroom. I remember your bows and polka dots and “just a few fries.” I remember the green blanket. I remember just like it was yesterday the way it felt to sit on your lap and have you sing “She’s Grandma’s Little Baby.” I remember just like it was yesterday the day you told me I could “Shit in the sugar bowl.” I remember just like it was yesterday telling you that you were going to be a great-grandma…for the first time. I remember just like it was yesterday the 1st time you held him in your arms; you helped me raise him. Your house was always our home. I remember just like it was yesterday having my heart broken but you helped me mend it. I remember just like it was yesterday asking for your help when I couldn’t do it on my own; you’ve always been my rock. I remember just like it was yesterday confiding my secrets to you – you were the first to know another baby was on the way, this time a girl. I remember just like it was yesterday the joy they brought to your life; they were the reason you didn’t give up. I remember just like it was yesterday saying words I never meant, not spending more time with you because my life got in the way. I remember just like it was yesterday you loving on me, your strength and vitality, your faith, hope and kindness. I remember just like it was yesterday wishing for more tomorrows so I could tell you that I love you another time. I remember just like it was yesterday having you tell me you love me, “more than anyone will ever know.” I remember just like it was yesterday you taught me to never say good-bye, just say “I’ll see you later.

,...for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. A nostalgic list, but then, of course, where could one find a more nostalgic subject?

Fides, Spes Joy is come to the little Everywhere; Pink to the peach and pink to the apple, White to the pear. Stars are come to the dogwood, Astral, pale; Mists are pink on the red-bud, Veil after veil. Flutes for the feathery locusts, Soft as spray; Tongues of the lovers for chestnuts, poplars, Babbling May. Yellow plumes for the willows’ Wind-blown hair; Oak trees and sycamores only Comfortless bare. Sore from steel and the watching, Somber and old,— Wooing robes for the beeches, larches, Splashed with gold; Breath o’ love to the lilac, Warm with noon.— Great hearts cold when the little Beat mad so soon. What is their faith to bear it Till it come, Waiting with rain-cloud and swallow, Frozen, dumb?

Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of all emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover’s eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child’s Sunday, lost voices, one’s favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. — Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (Vintage International, 2012)

Let me begin by telling you that I was in love. An ordinary statement, to be sure, but not an ordinary fact, for so few of us learn that love is tenderness, and tenderness is not, as a fair proportion suspect, pity; and still fewer know that happiness in love is not the absolute focusing of emotion in another: one has always to love a good many things which the beloved must come only to symbolize; the true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilac opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. A nostalgic list, but then, of course, where could one find a more nostalgic subject?

Ant then, opening her eyes, how fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry, laid in wicker trays the roses looked; and dark and prim the red carnations, holding their heads up; and all the sweet peas spreading in their bowls, tinged violet, snow white, pale - as if it were the evening and girls in muslin frocks came out to pick sweet peas and roses after the superb summer's day, with its almost blue-black sky, its delphiniums, its carnations, its arum lilies was over; and it was the moment between six and seven when every flower - roses, carnations, irises, lilac - glows; white, violet, red, deep orange; every flower seems to burn by itself, softly, purely in the misty beds; and how she loved the grey-white moths spinning in and out, over the cherry pie, over the evening primroses!

You are in his car and your words taste like honey. The suns yolk is stretching over the road, with hues of pink and red ribbon pressed against the bruises of the sky. He is talking about mechanics or sugar factories, and you are touching the rings on your fingers. The windows are open and the wind is making a home in your bones. Your jeans are ripped, your perfume smells like lilacs, your nails painted the color of sea weed. You forget about noise. You forget about color. It’s your lungs - I think, it’s your lungs that are morphing into purple butter. You are in his car and you are Mozart composing art, Claude Monet painting Water Lilies, you are Aphrodite, you are Shakespeare. You are in his car and you can’t remember what salt feels like against your tongue. You are in his car and you are ocean, fire - lip, tongue, breath, sweat. You are in his car and you are telling him you love him. You are in his car and he is telling you he loves you back.

Griff entered the cave, sword in hand. He had no desire to frighten Astelle, but he had to be prepared for anything. She jumped up from her fireside position with a small stifled scream at his entry, then continued to back fearfully towards the shadowed wall. She was quite alone. Griff could sense no other presence – only hers, and the wonder of it. He sheathed his sword, and gazed upon his long-lost love. Her hair had lost all trace of colour while still retaining the texture of youth, giving the appearance of white silk. There was a pulsating light of a blue-lilac shade which clung to the crown of her head, reflecting in the hair – a soul – a lost spirit – someone who had loved her. She was almost as pale as death, for Torking took far too much blood from her, too frequently. She was also much thinner than she should have been, but for all of this, she was still the most beautiful sight of his life. Her body was ravaged with Torking's bites and claw-marks. She was still wearing his old cloak which Griff instantly recognised, though it was little more than a rag, wrapped around her body and tied on one shoulder. Her beautiful dark eyes, those which had so haunted his dreams, seemed over-large in her pale face, as she stared at him with a mingling of shock, disbelief and joy. Griff took a few hesitant steps towards her, unsure of his reception. ‘Astelle?’ His voice grated with emotion. How often had she yearned to hear him speak her name exactly in that way? ‘Astelle – is it really you?’ He was just as divinely handsome as she remembered, and he looked so fine – he looked magnificent in Gremlen battledress. In the flickering torchlight, the blue krulmesh armour glittered over the black leather tunic. The emerald sheen in his raven hair was vivid as ever. Best of all, his dark forest-green eyes were shining with love, and she suddenly understood that Griff was a hundred times more beautiful than Torking, for his eyes held everything that was good, fine and noble. Astelle's heart almost stopped beating as she gazed at him. Her eyes filled with tears, and her lip trembled as she tried to whisper his name.

He pulled a battered red photo album from his truck’s glove compartment and showed me pictures of green Azorean fields divided by hedges of lilac-colored hydrangeas. He showed me waves crashing against black volcanic rock and his ancient stone house next to the sea, the home where he returned every summer. “Over there the air is so clean, so nice. The ocean is right there. The fish are fresh, you catch and eat them, and the potatoes are so good, you won’t believe it. “We make wine. Put on shorts and get in there and smash grapes, and when you drink right away is sweet like juice. Every year when we get back from there, we’re fat,” Morais said. He loved his island house in the Azores so much that at the end of each summer, when he left, he had to have someone else close the door for him. “I’m a guy that came from the old country. I never go to school five minutes in this country, and still I work and I do good. I love my money. God bless this country,” he said. “But when I leave to close my door over there, I cry like a baby. I try so hard not to, but I cry.

FROM THE WAVERLEY KITCHEN JOURNAL Angelica - Will shape its meaning to your need, but it is particularly good for calming hyper children at your table. Anise Hyssop - Eases frustration and confusion. Bachelor’s Button - Aids in finding things that were previously hidden. A clarifying flower. Chicory - Conceals bitterness. Gives the eater a sense that all is well. A cloaking flower. Chive Blossom - Ensures you will win an argument. Conveniently, also an antidote for hurt feelings. Dandelion - A stimulant encouraging faithfulness. Frequent side effects are blindness to flaws and spontaneous apologies. Honeysuckle - For seeing in the dark, but only if you use honeysuckle from a brush of vines at least two feet thick. A clarifying flower. Hyacinth Bulb - Causes melancholy and thoughts of past regrets. Use only dried bulbs. A time-travel flower. Lavender - Raises spirits. Prevents bad decisions resulting from fatigue or depression. Lemon Balm - Upon consumption, for a brief period of time the eater will think and feel as he did in his youth. Please note if you have any former hellions at your table before serving. A time-travel flower. Lemon Verbena - Produces a lull in conversation with a mysterious lack of awkwardness. Helpful when you have nervous, overly talkative guests. Lilac - When a certain amount of humility is in order. Gives confidence that humbling yourself to another will not be used against you. Marigold - Causes affection, but sometimes accompanied by jealousy. Nasturtium - Promotes appetite in men. Makes women secretive. Secret sexual liaisons sometimes occur in mixed company. Do not let your guests out of your sight. Pansy - Encourages the eater to give compliments and surprise gifts. Peppermint - A clever method of concealment. When used with other edible flowers, it confuses the eater, thus concealing the true nature of what you are doing. A cloaking flower. Rose Geranium - Produces memories of past good times. Opposite of Hyacinth Bulb. A time-travel flower. Rose Petal - Encourages love. Snapdragon - Wards off the undue influences of others, particularly those with magical sensibilities. Squash and Zucchini Blossoms - Serve when you need to be understood. Clarifying flowers. Tulip - Gives the eater a sense of sexual perfection. A possible side effect is being susceptible to the opinions of others. Violet - A wonderful finish to a meal. Induces calm, brings on happiness, and always assures a good night’s sleep.

This Compost" Something startles me where I thought I was safest, I withdraw from the still woods I loved, I will not go now on the pastures to walk, I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea, I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me. O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken? How can you be alive you growths of spring? How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you? Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead? Where have you disposed of their carcasses? Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations? Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat? I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd, I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath, I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat. 2 Behold this compost! behold it well! Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold! The grass of spring covers the prairies, The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden, The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward, The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches, The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves, The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree, The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests, The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs, The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare, Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves, Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards, The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead. What chemistry! That the winds are really not infectious, That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me, That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues, That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it, That all is clean forever and forever, That the cool drink from the well tastes so good, That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy, That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me, That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease, Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease. Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient, It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas'd corpses, It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops, It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

University Hospital, Boston The trees on the hospital lawn are lush and thriving. They too are getting the best of care, like you, and the anonymous many, in the clean rooms high above this city, where day and night the doctors keep arriving, where intricate machines chart with cool devotion the murmur of the blood, the slow patching-up of bone, the despair of the mind. When I come to visit and we walk out into the light of a summer day, we sit under the trees- buckeyes, as sycamore and one black walnut brooding high over a hedge of lilacs as old as the red-brick building behind them, the original hospital built before the Civil War. We sit on the law together, holding hands while you tell me: you are better. How many young men, I wonder, came here, wheeled on cots off the slow trains from th red and hideous battlefields to lie all summer in the small and stuffy chambers while doctors did what they could, longing for tools still unimagined, medicines still unfound, wisdoms still unguessed at, and how many died staring at the leaves of the trees, blind to the terrible effort around them to keep them alive? I look into your eyes which are sometimes green and sometimes gray, and sometimes full of humor, but often not, and tell myself, you are better, because my life without you would be a place of parched and broken trees. Later, walking the corridors down to the street, I turn and step inside an emty room. Yesterday someone was here with a gasping face. Now the bed is made all new, the machines have been rolled away. The silence continues, deep and neutral, as I stand there, loving you.

Colette"s "My Mother's House" and "Sido" After seeing the movie "Colette" I felt so sad that it didn't even touch the living spirit of her that exists in her writing. 'What are you doing with that bucket, mother? Couldn't you wait until Josephine (the househelp) arrives?' "And out I hurried. But the fire was already blazing, fed with dry wood. The milk was boiling on the blue-tiled charcoal stove. Nearby, a bar of chocolate was melting in a little water for my breakfast, and, seated squarely in her cane armchair, my mother was grinding the fragrant coffee which she roasted herself. The morning hours were always kind to her. She wore their rosy colours in her cheeks. Flushed with a brief return to health, she would gaze at the rising sun, while the church bell rang for early Mass, and rejoice at having tasted, while we still slept, so many forbidden fruits. "The forbidden fruits were the over-heavy bucket drawn up from the well, the firewood split with a billhook on an oaken block, the spade, the mattock, and above all the double steps propped against the gable-windows of the attic, the flowery spikes of the too-tall lilacs, the dizzy cat that had to be rescued from the ridge of the roof. All the accomplices of her old existence as a plump and sturdy little woman, all the minor rustic divinities who once obeyed her and made her so proud of doing without servants, now assumed the appearance and position of adversaries. But they reckoned without that love of combat which my mother was to keep till the end of her life. At seventy-one dawn still found her undaunted, if not always undamaged. Burnt by fire, cut with the pruning knife, soaked by melting snow or spilt water, she had always managed to enjoy her best moments of independence before the earliest risers had opened their shutters. She was able to tell us of the cats' awakening, of what was going on in the nests, of news gleaned, together with the morning's milk and the warm loaf, from the milkmaid and the baker's girl, the record in fact of the birth of a new day.

30 · First Party And even the very skies that framed New York, the texture of the night itself, seemed to have the architecture and the weather of the city’s special quality. It was, he saw, a Northern city: the bases of its form were vertical. Even the night here, the quality of darkness, had a structural framework, an architecture of its own. Here, compared with the qualities of night in London or in Paris, which were rounder, softer, of more drowsy hue, the night was vertical, lean, immensely clifflike, steep and clear. Here everything was sharp. It burned so brightly, yet it burned sweetly, too. For what was so incredible and so lovely about this high, cool night was that it could be so harsh and clear, so arrogantly formidable, and yet so tender, too. There were always in these nights, somehow, even in nights of clear and bitter cold, not only the structure of lean steel, but a touch of April, too: they could be insolent and cruel, and yet there was always in them the suggestion of light feet, of lilac darkness, of something swift and fleeting, almost captured, ever gone, a maiden virginal as April. 30. Първият прием стр. 519 Дори самото небе, надвиснало над Ню Йорк, дори тъканта на нощта като че ли бяха придобили специфичната структура и настроението на града. Това беше северен тип град - линиите му бяха предимно вертикални. Тук дори нощта и тъмнината притежаваха собствен строеж и архитектура. В сравнение с нощите на Париж и Лондон, които бяха по-овални, по-меки и по-сънливи, нощта на Ню Йорк беше вертикална, източена, наподобяваща безкрайно стръмна и гладка стена. Тук всичко беше остро и ръбато, и блясъкът му беше остър, но и така приятен. Невероятното и очарователното в тази блестяща студена нощ беше, че тя можеше да бъде неприветлива и сурова, арогантно страховита и в същото време толкова мека и нежна. Винаги в такива нощи, дори когато бяха сурови и леденостудени, се долавяше дъхът не само на стоманените конструкции, но и на април: те можеха да бъдат нагли и жестоки и все пак в тях долитаха леки стъпки. Обгръщаше ги теменужна тъма, имаше нещо бързо и преходно, почти уловимо и вечно изплъзващо се, моминско и девствено като април.

And the ladies dressed in red for my pain and with my pain latched onto my breath, clinging like the fetuses of scorpions in the deepest crook of my neck, the mothers in red who sucked out the last bit of heat that my barely beating heart could give me — I always had to learn on my own the steps you take to drink and eat and breathe, I was never taught to cry and now will never learn to do this, least of all from the great ladies latched onto the lining of my breath with reddish spit and floating veils of blood, my blood, mine alone, which I drew myself and which they drink from now after murdering the king whose body is listing in the river and who moves his eyes and smiles, though he’s dead and when you’re dead, you’re dead, for all the smiling you do, and the great ladies, the tragic ladies in red have murdered the one who is floating down the river and I stay behind like a hostage in their eternal custody. I want to die to the letter of the law of the commonplace, where we are assured that dying is the same as dreaming. The light, the forbidden wine, the vertigo. Who is it you write for? The ruins of an abandoned temple. If only celebration were possible. A mournful vision, splintered, of a garden of broken statues. Numb time, time like a glove upon a drum. The three who compete in me remain on a shifting point and we neither are nor is. My eyes used to find rest in humiliated, forsaken things. Nowadays I see with them; I’ve seen and approved of nothing. Seated at the bottom of a lake. She has lost her shadow, but not the desire to be, to lose. She is alone with her images. Dressed in red, and unseeing. Who has reached this place that no one ever reaches? The lord of those dead who are dressed in red. The man who is masked in a faceless face. The one who came for her takes her without him. Dressed in black, and seeing. The one who didn’t know how to die of love and so couldn’t learn a thing. She is sad because she is not there. There are words with hands; barely written, they search my heart. There are words condemned like the lilac in a tempest. There are words resembling some among the dead, and from these I prefer the ones that evoke the doll of some unhappy girl. Ward 18 when I think of occupational therapy I think of poking out my eyes in a house in ruin then eating them while thinking of all my years of continuous writing, 15 or 20 hours writing without a break, whetted by the demon of analogies, trying to configure my terrible wandering verbal matter, because — oh dear old Sigmund Freud — psychoanalytic science forgot its key somewhere: to open it opens but how to close the wound? for other imponderables lovelier than the smile of the Virgin of the Rocks the shadows strike blows the black shadows of the dead nothing but blows and there were cries nothing but blows