Jacques Henri Lartigue, "Florette, Piozzo, Juillet 1959." (Other Lartigue clotheslines here.)
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James Tate, "At the Clothesline."
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Related: "Love calls us to the things of this world."
at the clothesline
Jacques Henri Lartigue, "Florette, Piozzo, Juillet 1959." (Other Lartigue clotheslines here.)
'let america be america again'
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!
Langston Hughes, 1902-1967.
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Originally posted 7/4/2018, brought to mind thanks to the wonderful people at Terrace Books.
playing with fire
Fourth of July, 1954. Photographs by Peter Stackpole for LIFE Magazine. Originally posted June 30, 2011.
imaginary outfit: postcards from italy
Notes from two weeks in Italy, March 2026:
Venice: A shop crammed with velvet gondolier slippers, tiny glass snails and mushrooms and dachshunds (saw dachshunds everywhere). Old wells around every corner and brass door buzzers that looked like doodled faces. Shops selling turned-wood geometric shapes, convex witches' mirrors, and wool sweaters and skirts of elegant plainness and eye-popping affordability. Fortuny's private library/wonder cabinet, with tiny theatres, cloud projection scrims, and pleated silk gowns. The zine library + fabulously slouchy couches at Fondazione Quarini Stampalia (and the tiny Carlos Scarpa garden with its spiraled water channel). Cornell boxes + dog memorials at Peggy Guggenheim's palazzo. A grocery store in an old, fresco-adorned theater. Vaporettos up and down the canals. Citrus trees.
Salami sandwiches and travel Scrabble. Bumping luggage over cobbles. Extraordinarily tiny cars.
Venice: A shop crammed with velvet gondolier slippers, tiny glass snails and mushrooms and dachshunds (saw dachshunds everywhere). Old wells around every corner and brass door buzzers that looked like doodled faces. Shops selling turned-wood geometric shapes, convex witches' mirrors, and wool sweaters and skirts of elegant plainness and eye-popping affordability. Fortuny's private library/wonder cabinet, with tiny theatres, cloud projection scrims, and pleated silk gowns. The zine library + fabulously slouchy couches at Fondazione Quarini Stampalia (and the tiny Carlos Scarpa garden with its spiraled water channel). Cornell boxes + dog memorials at Peggy Guggenheim's palazzo. A grocery store in an old, fresco-adorned theater. Vaporettos up and down the canals. Citrus trees.
Salami sandwiches and travel Scrabble. Bumping luggage over cobbles. Extraordinarily tiny cars.
Florence: A medieval abbey turned into a massive public library with a cafe on the top and a sneaky, beautiful view of the candy-striped Duomo; the third-oldest botanical garden in the world, full of charmingly overgrown greenhouses and flowerbeds; a garden of wax flowers, cabinets of shells and butterflies and beautiful rocks at La Specola; pictures made of rock at Opficio delle Pietra Dure; the sacred Ainu sticks in the old anthropological museum and its specimen cases made with old, wavy glass; the hidden garden at Basicila San Spirito; the Medicis' citrus collection at the Boboli Gardens (and oodles of little lizards running around in the sun); pop-up paper fairies and miniature accordian-file books with vintage imags of the city at Eredi Paperone; shimmery Rothkos hung in monk's cells next to Fra Angelico's luminous frescos at San Marco. Todo Modo, a bookstore/publisher/press/cafe. Many epic vintage shops. Ringing a bell for spritzes. Salted cream gelato. A roll of watercolor pencils tied with grosgrain ribbon; hand-glazed espresso cups. Diamond earrings of constellations and Florentine sandals in a small shop stocked with expensive workwear. A miniature train world created by an obsessive Sicilian count.
Horrid food poisoning for Sean. An unplanned extra day in Florence. Dry biscuits on trains; blurry landscapes. Five flights up, up, up for rooftop views in Trastevere.
Rome: Bernini's Daphne, with her toes turning to roots and fingers to translucent leaves; gleaming candied peels and marzipan fruits; fountains of sunken boats; a tiny, wisteria-hung balcony over the Spanish Steps attached to the Keats-Shelly house; galleries of micromosaic butterflies and marble animals at the Vatican museums, a starry door, celestial globes, and a floor of mosaic crows; an old cookie shop in Trastevere with photos of beloved cats on the walls; a shatteringly thin biscuit flavored with fennel. Churches everywhere hung with chandeliers and adorned with skulls and angels (my favorites, I think, were the Basilica of Saint Mary Minerva, Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin, and Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere); the rooms of special stones at the Capitoline, plus its stunning views of the Forum and the city. Cats dozing on broken columns in the Largo Argentina. Passionfruit mango gelato, and another gelato that tasted of peaches and wine (went back for seconds of both). Wild cherry and coffee granitas every day, heaped with whipped cream. A street of shops for priestly vestements and a smocked undershirt of pleated, translucent silk. Crossing the Tiber using oldest bridge in the city. Antica Cartotecnica's old postcards and wall of typewriters and leather satchels; also the little notebooks stamped with the Italian words for dreams and thoughts. Everywhere, fabulous bookstores—holes-in-the-wall with foxed paperbacks, and airy fresco-ceilinged compilations of art books and fancy paper goods.
Glimpses of a garden center we did not get to explore from the taxi window. Duty-free Swatches and Adidas at the airport; tiny magnets shaped like bags of pasta, cans of tomatoes, wedges of cheese, and bottles of Aperol.
Horrid food poisoning for Sean. An unplanned extra day in Florence. Dry biscuits on trains; blurry landscapes. Five flights up, up, up for rooftop views in Trastevere.
Rome: Bernini's Daphne, with her toes turning to roots and fingers to translucent leaves; gleaming candied peels and marzipan fruits; fountains of sunken boats; a tiny, wisteria-hung balcony over the Spanish Steps attached to the Keats-Shelly house; galleries of micromosaic butterflies and marble animals at the Vatican museums, a starry door, celestial globes, and a floor of mosaic crows; an old cookie shop in Trastevere with photos of beloved cats on the walls; a shatteringly thin biscuit flavored with fennel. Churches everywhere hung with chandeliers and adorned with skulls and angels (my favorites, I think, were the Basilica of Saint Mary Minerva, Basilica di Santa Maria in Cosmedin, and Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere); the rooms of special stones at the Capitoline, plus its stunning views of the Forum and the city. Cats dozing on broken columns in the Largo Argentina. Passionfruit mango gelato, and another gelato that tasted of peaches and wine (went back for seconds of both). Wild cherry and coffee granitas every day, heaped with whipped cream. A street of shops for priestly vestements and a smocked undershirt of pleated, translucent silk. Crossing the Tiber using oldest bridge in the city. Antica Cartotecnica's old postcards and wall of typewriters and leather satchels; also the little notebooks stamped with the Italian words for dreams and thoughts. Everywhere, fabulous bookstores—holes-in-the-wall with foxed paperbacks, and airy fresco-ceilinged compilations of art books and fancy paper goods.
Glimpses of a garden center we did not get to explore from the taxi window. Duty-free Swatches and Adidas at the airport; tiny magnets shaped like bags of pasta, cans of tomatoes, wedges of cheese, and bottles of Aperol.
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Ichi Antiquities typewriter pants and shirt / Madewell Lantern straw hat (past season) / Runaway Bicycle handloom cotton jacket / Beklina Pensionata shoes / ancient Roman signet ring, 2nd century AD / Plain Goods vintage drop earrings / vintage square-faced Rolex, ca. 1913 / Camp Snap screen-free digital camera (we got one of these for the trip and loved using it) / Il Bisonte Linea 1978 crossbody bag / Parvum Opus intaglio notebook / vintage Super P ballpoint pen.
odds and ends / 5.21.2026 (may flowers)
Albert Marquet (1875-1947), "Flowering Tree," undated, via le jardin robo.
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Poem by “Michael Field,” the pen name of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, published in 1893.
"Medaljonger" tapestry designed by Märta Måås-Fjetterström in 1926.
Estrid Ericson at her summer house, Tolvekarna, in 1942, photographed by Bo Törngren, via Svenkst Tenn. (More photos here, including a truly enviable picnic set-up.)
Fernando Pessoa, 115 [c. 2 September 1923], from The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis.
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"Gertrude always loved her flowers 1937," from the Peter J. Cohen collection.
Poem by “Michael Field,” the pen name of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, published in 1893.
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Whether I pick you or leave you, flowers,
Your destiny remains the same.
You, path that I follow, are heading
For other destinations, not just mine.
We are nothing that is of any worth
And are therefore doubly worthless.
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"Her mouth breathes flowers ..."
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To compare women to flowers is another habit of eternity or of triviality. Here are some examples. “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys,” says the Shulamite in the Song of Solomon. In the story of Math, which makes up the Fourth Branch of the medieval Welsh tale known as the Mabinogion, a lord is asked to form a woman who is not of this world, and by “magic and enchantment” conjures one out of “the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet….” In the Fifth Adventure of the Nibelungenlied, Siegfried at last beholds Kriemhild, and the first thing we are told is that her skin shines with the glow of roses. Ariosto, imitating Catullus, compares a maiden to a hidden flower (Orlando, I, 42); in Armida’s garden, in Tasso, a purplebeaked bird exhorts the lovers not to let this flower wither (Gerusalemme, XVI, 13-15). At the end of the sixteenth century, Malherbe tries to console a friend on the death of his daughter and in his condolence are these words: “Et, rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses” (“And, a rose, she lived the lifetime of a rose”). Shakespeare, in a garden, admires the deep vermilion of the roses and the whiteness of the lilies, but these delights for him are but shadows of his absent love (Sonnets, XCVIII). “God, making roses, made my face,” says the Queen of Samothrace on a page of Swinburne. This list might go on without end; The same metaphor is suggested with delicacy in Milton’s famous lines (Paradise Lost, IV, 268-71) on the abduction of Proserpine, and in these lines from Darío: let it suffice to recall that scene in Stevenson’s last book, Weir of Hermiston, in which the hero wants to find out whether Christina had a soul in her or “if she were only an animal the colour of flowers….”
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If a man could pass through Paradise in a Dream, & have a Flower presented to him as a pledge that his Soul had really been there, & found that Flower in his hand when he awoke—Aye! and what then?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from the Notebooks.
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silvered flowers, beehive bonbons, and a deck of rainbows/gifts some mothers may enjoy
The Shenandoah Mansions linen robe (and/or the matching pajamas and eye mask) by Desmond & Dempsey and Ash Hotels.
Beehive bonbons from Shane's Confectionery filled with honey and black sesame praline.
English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, about:
[A] series of obscure and eccentric English garden-makers who, between the early seventeenth and early twentieth centuries, created intensely personal and idiosyncratic gardens. They include such fascinating characters as the superstitious antiquary William Stukeley and the animal- and bird-loving Lady Read, as well as the celebrated master of Vauxhall Gardens, Jonathan Tyers, who created ... one of the gloomiest and most perverse anti-pleasure gardens in Georgian England. Others built miniature mountains, shaped topiaries, displayed exotic animals, excavated caves, and assembled architectural fragments and fossils to realise their gardens ...
Nomenclature of Colors playing cards by Roomytown.
A snail sketch print by Annette Messager, "Locus Solus XIII," because, snail-like, mothers have the power to carry home with them.
An album worth blasting on the way to and from pick-up.
Bienamé hand creams that smell like life in bloom, the color red, or happy days.
Peaceful girl with fist charm by Leith Clark x Catbird (I like to think she is catching a star).
An Apogee card featuring a quote by Gary Indiana, wishing for the ineffable.
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Related posts: choosing motherhood / what's possible / true colors
Other gifts some mothers may enjoy: 2017 / 2018 / 2019 / 2020 / 2021 / 2022 / 2023 / 2024 / 2025
sunday tune: world party - 'ship of fools'
We're setting sail
To the place on the map from which no one has ever returned
Drawn by the promise of the joker and the fool
By the light of the crosses that burn
Drawn by the promise of the women and the lace
And the gold and the cotton and pearls
It's the place where they keep all the darkness you need
You sail away from the light of the world on this trip baby
Pay, you will pay tomorrow
You're gonna pay tomorrow
You will pay tomorrow
Save me, save me from tomorrow
I don't want to sail with this ship of fools, no no
Oh, save me, save me from tomorrow
I don't want to sail with this ship of fools, no no
I want to run and hide
Right now
Avarice and greed are gonna drive you over the endless sea
They will leave you drifting in the shallows
Drowning in the oceans of history
Travellin' the world, you're in search of no good
But I'm sure you'll build your Sodom like I knew you would
Using all the good people for your galley slaves
As your little boat struggles through the the warning waves
But you don't pay, you will pay tomorrow
You're gonna pay tomorrow, yeah
You gonna pay tomorrow
Save me, save me from tomorrow
I don't want to sail with this ship of fools, no
Oh, save me, save me from tomorrow
I don't want to sail with this ship of fools, no, no, no
Where's it comin' from or where's it goin' to?
It's just a, it's just a ship of fools
All aboard
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Originally posted in 2020, but very much on my mind right now.
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