and I still see their faces...

A few samples from an amazing photographic archive of Polish Jewry before the Shoah.

seasonal citation

"Fall is a great touring show, poetically deceptive, an enormous purple-skinned onion disclosing ever new panoramas under each of its skins. No center can be reached. Behind each wing that is moved and stored away, new and radiant scenes open up, true and alive for a moment, until you realize that they are made of cardboard. All perspectives are painted, and only the smell is authentic, the smell of wilting scenery or theatrical dressing rooms, a pile up of discarded costumes among which you wade endlessly as if through yellow fallen leaves."

Bruno Schulz, "A Second Fall"

auguries of autumn

some seasonal scenes by the prolific and rather sweet Tor Lundvall

Under the Shadows of Trees #5, 2001

The Secret Place, 2000


October Moon, 2000


November, 1999

FRÈRE BOIS par TRISTAN TZARA

frère bois
et sœur pierre
les malins
vont au bois
cueillir des pierres

sur les douves
dans les prés
on ne trouve
que regrets
parait-il

*

tu ouvres les ailes
pour partir en voyage
tu te moques de nous
cheval
à ton âge

*

tard levé
tôt couché
soleil frileux
parle-moi de Botticelli

some crows

Japanese prints, early 20th century

anticipating winter in a warm season

No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

by Wallace Stevens

He is not here, the old sun,
As absent as if we were asleep.

The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.
Bad is final in this light.

In this bleak air the broken stalks
Have arms without hands. They have trunks

Without legs or, for that, without heads.
They have heads in which a captive cry

Is merely the moving of a tongue.
Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,

Like seeing fallen brightly away.
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.

It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,

Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.

The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye...

One joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree.