Winter: SPADES

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Day 274: Ace

And down he hastened into that Eden of poisonous flowers.

 - Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

Day 287: King

I don’t know whether the blueprint pushes the action

ahead or follow it, but I have often composed with diagrams.

-Kitasono Katue, oceans beyond monotonous space

Day 299: Queen

Sweet Songs don’t last too long /

On broken radios.

-John Prine, “Sam Stone”

Day 310: Jack

Even Blake’s “poetic genius” (Los) couldn’t accomplish its embodiment alone. The story itself demands a woman’s “weaving” ….

-Jack Clarke, From Feathers to Iron

“Held you for a little while” is from Leonard Cohen’s “My Oh My”

Day 320: 10

… or we may send over the earth a wave

of electricity traveling at any rate we desire,

from the pace of a turtle up to lightning speed.

- Nikola Tesla, “The Problem of Increasing Human Energy”

Day 329: 9

You got news for me / I got nothing for you.

-John Prine, “Quiet Man”

Day 338: 8

I mean, you must take living so seriously /

that even at seventy, for example, /

you’ll plant olive trees

-Nazin Hikmet, “On Living”

For more than forty years, Israel has uprooted

over one million trees … in Palestine.

-Sonja Karkar “Heritage uprooted” The Electronic Intifada

Day 345: 7

Or the onset of snow; who hears this now?

-Edgar Anderson, Landscape Papers

Day 351: 6

Romanticism and technology…are mirror images of each other, both being products of man’s dominance over nature ….

-Walter Ong, “Romantic Difference and Technology”

Day 356: 5

Let us carve beautiful birds, /

send our souls to fly away.

-Gary Lawless, “Caribou Sutra”

“starved for love” is from Maggie Jaffe’s “Comrades, Mayakovsky”

Day 359: 4

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice,

a continual extinction of personality.

-T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

Day 362: 3

“Two hearts that beat as one,” I said.

“T-wo-ha, ha, ha,--two-ha, ha, ha, …”

- James Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

Day 365: Deuce

… everything that lives,

Lives not alone, nor for itself….

- William Blake, The Book of Thel