el temblor in the morning

the dream was at the brink of becoming a nightmare;
I was desperate,
running up to say something to her that she wouldn’t or couldn’t understand exactly
in the way that I did because I thought
if she did she would change her mind and tell me something like
you are my love and you have good thoughts and you are beautiful
her face pushing out from the background and my trying to grasp
there was something, an argument, about who had been responsible,
she accused me of having hurt the child when I was a child, but
I should avoid falling into autobiographical anecdote
as it doesn't even make sense to me.
under the window covered in bamboo string drawn shades
my hand on a white painted wall
I wake to shuddering
in the softness of my bed
from a threatening pressure
that feels, I suppose, like the physical manifestation of a thought
from the earth, unconscious, dreaming,
unknowingly disturbing
as it tosses in sleep
because no one sleeps alone.

there is so much going on in this image that i never noticed before. the huge open eyes of the little woman, the anger in the face of the little cat by her side, the darkness of the little dog, his opaqueness, the lines, the fence that separates them, the connection of their gazes, the curiosity, the spontaneity, the fragility, the starkness of the tree, the dirt of the cement wall, the scratches, the desperate strokes of a fading paintbrush that puts the blurry and bruised but indelible words onto the ground below them, of letters that begin thick, that unravel and ease off, the pressure of their painting loosening,
the intensity of their meaning escapes them



.

What wondrous love is this, oh my soul, oh my soul,

.

"A Klee drawing named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

— Walter Benjamin,

Ninth Thesis on the Philosophy of History