Quote of the Day (Frank O'Hara, on ‘The Spent Purpose of a Perfectly Marvellous Life’)

“The spent purpose of a perfectly marvellous
life suddenly glimmers and leaps into flame
it's more difficult than you think to make charcoal
it's also pretty hard to remember life's marvellous
but there it is guttering choking then soaring
in the mirrored room of this consciousness
it's practically a blaze of pure sensibility
and however exaggerated at least somethings going on
and the quick oxygen in the air will not go neglected
will not sulk or fall into blackness and peat.”—American poet and art critic Frank O'Hara (1926-1966), “In Favor of One's Time,” Poetry Magazine, May 1960, reprinted in The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002: Ninety Years of America's Most Distinguished Verse Magazine, edited by Joseph Parisi and Stephen Young (2002)

Quote of the Day (Brian Doyle, on ‘The House of the Heart’)

“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words 'I have something to tell you,' a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.”— Spiritual author-editor Brian Doyle (1956-2017), One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder for the Spiritual and Nonspiritual Alike (2019)

I took the image accompanying this post in July 2013 at Lake Chautauqua, in upstate New York. I think it conveys something of the sense of loneliness and wonder that the late Brian Doyle was expressing here.