Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Song of Myself, Walt Whitman

Lovelier girl

Winter kept us warm, covering earth in forgetful snow

The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot

The world is lazy but you and me we're just crazy

She turned over to the wall and idly, with one finger, she traced a poppy on the wall-paper with a leaf and a stem and a fat bursting bud. In the quiet, and under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals, the stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight glazed bud. Things had a habit of coming alive like that.

Bliss, Katherine Mansfield

Writers in their married bliss

Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Paris, 1929

And the two women stood side by side looking at the slender, flowering tree. Although it was so still it seemed, like the flame of a candle, to stretch up, to point, to quiver in the bright air, to grow taller and taller as they gazed - almost to touch the rim of the round, silver moon.

How long did they stand there? Both, as it were, caught that circle of unearthly light, understanding each other perfectly, creatures of another world, and wondering what they were to do in this one with all this blissful treasure that burned in their bosoms and dropped, in silver flowers, from their hair and hands?

Bliss, Katherine Mansfield

And she seemed to see on her eyelids the lovely pear tree with its wide open blossoms as a symbol of her own life.

Bliss, Katherine Mansfield

Will is a blue friend of mine with whom I spend a whole lot of my time

Francoise Sagan, St. Tropez, 1956, by Jeanloup Sieff

But on the other side of the drive there was a high box border and the paths had box edges and all of them led into a deeper and deeper tangle of flowers. The camellias were in bloom, white and crimson and pink and white striped with flashing leaves. You could not see a leaf on the syringa bushes for the white clusters. The roses were in flower - gentlemen's button-hole roses, little white ones, but far too full of insects to hold under anyone's nose, pink monthly roses with a ring of fallen petals round the bushes, cabbage roses on thick stalks, moss roses, always in bud, pink smooth beauties opening curl on curl, red ones so dark they seemed to turn back as they fell, and a certain exquisite cream kind with a slender red stem and bright scarlet leaves.

There were clumps of fairy bells, and all kinds of geraniums, and there were little trees of verbena and bluish lavender bushes and a bed of pelargoniums with velvet eyes and leaves like moths' wings. There was a bed of nothing but mignonette and another of nothing but pansies - borders of double and single daisies and all kinds of little tufty plants she had never seen before.

The red-hot pokers were taller than she; the Japanese sunflowers grew in a tiny jungle. She sat down on one of the box borders. By pressing hard at first it made a nice seat. But how dusty it was inside! Kezia bent down to look and sneezed and rubbed her nose.

Prelude, Katherine Mansfield

Through all the lying days of my youth

I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun

The Coming of Wisdom With Time, W. B. Yeats

They no sooner looked but they loved.

A World of Love, Elizabeth Bowen

A poem a poem
I shall write
I haven't a clue what about
I'd like it to be about you*

*to Kurt Vonnegut

Rondal Partridge

"That is an aloe, Kezia," said her mother.
"Does it ever have any flowers?"
"Yes, Kezia," and Linda smiled down at her, and half shut her eyes. "Once every hundred years."

Prelude, Katherine Mansfield

"It's very quiet now," she thought. She opened her eyes wide, and she heard the silence spinning its soft endless web. How lightly she breathed; she scarcely had to breathe at all.

Prelude, Katherine Mansfield

You go your way
I'll go your way too

The Sweetest Little Song, Leonard Cohen

He groaned for love and caught her close again. And again, as always, he had the feeling that he was holding something that never was quite his - his. Something too delicate, too precious, that would fly away once he let go.

The Stranger, Katherine Mansfield

I should have been a worser woman without Bernard Shaw.

Letter from Virginia Woolf to George Bernard Shaw

We started speaking,
Looked at each other, then turned away.
The tears kept rising to my eyes
But I could not weep.
I wanted to take your hand
But my hand trembled.
You kept counting the days
Before we should meet again.
But both of us felt in our hearts
That we parted for ever and ever.
The ticking of the little clock filled the quiet room.
“Listen,” I said. “It is so loud,
Like a horse galloping on a lonely road,
As loud as that - a horse galloping past in the night.”
You shut me up in your arms.
But the sound of the clock stifled our hearts’ beating.
You said, “I cannot go : all that is living of me
Is here for ever and ever.”
Then you went.
The world changed. The sound of the clock grew fainter,
Dwindled away, became a minute thing.
I whispered in the darkness, “If it stops, I shall die.”

The Meeting, Katherine Mansfield

The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees
Hoard last year's leaves, won't mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn
To elegiac dryads, and dour grass
Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness
However the grandiloquent mind may scorn
Such poverty. No dead men's cries

Flower forget-me-nots between the stones
Paving this grave ground. Here's honest rot
To unpick the heart, pare bone
Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton
Bulks real, all saint's tongues fall quiet:
Flies watch no reserrections in the sun.

At the essential landscape stare, stare
Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind:
Whatever lost ghosts flare
Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor
Rave on the leash of the starving mind
Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

November Graveyard, Sylvia Plath

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hyères, France, 1932

In this hole that we have fixed
We get further and further and further
From what
We must do
I saw you outside that hole
This girl outside that hole
your mind finally free
from all the thoughts you thought
and all the thought of God

In this hole, Cat Power

First you run like a fool just to be at my side and now you run like a fool but you just run to hide

She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.

She tells her love while half asleep, Robert Graves