Apple and Butter, 2004
© Jessica Backhaus

Flume
by Bon Iver (Justin Vernon)

I am my mother’s only one
It’s enough

I wear my garment so it shows
Now you know

Only love is all maroon
Gluey feathers on a flume
Sky is womb and she’s the moon

I am my mother on the wall, with us all
I move in water, shore to shore;
Nothing’s more

Only love is all maroon
Lapping lakes like leary loons
Leaving rope burns –
Reddish ruse

Only love is all maroon
Gluey feathers on a flume
Sky is womb and she’s the moon

Popularity: 19% [?]

Girl in Fairground Caravan, 1926-1932
© August Sander

Oh Comely
by Jeff Mangum (of Neutral Milk Hotel)

Oh comely
I will be with you when you lose your breath
Chasing the only meaningful memory you thought you had left
With some pretty bright and bubbly terrible scene
That was doing her thing on your chest
But oh comely
It isn’t as pretty as you’d like to guess
In your memory you’re drunk on your automy
It doesn’t mean anything at all
Oh comely
All of your friends are all letting you blow
Bristling and ugly
Bursting with fruits falling out from the holes
Of some pretty bright and bubbly friend
You could need to say comforting things in your ear
But oh comely
There isn’t such one friend that you could find here
Standing next to me
He’s only my enemy
I’ll crush him with everything I own
Say what you want to say
Hang for your hollow ways
Moving your mouth to pull out all your miracles aimed for me

Your father made fetuses
With flesh licking ladies
While you and your mother
Were asleep in the trailer park
Thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadiums
The music and medicine you needed for comforting
So make all your fat fleshy fingers to moving
And pluck all your silly strings
And bend all your notes for me
Soft silly music is meaningful magical
The movements were beautiful
All in your ovaries
All of them milking with green fleshy flowers
While powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines
Smelling of semen all under the garden
Was all you were needing when you still believed in me
Say what your want to say
Hang for your hollow ways
Moving your mouth to pull out all your miracles aimed for me

And I know they buried her body with others
Her sister and mother and 500 families
And will she remember me 50 years later
I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine
Know all your enemies
We know who our enemies are

Goldaline my dear
We will fold and freeze together
Far away from here
There is sun and spring and green forever
But now we move to feel
For ourselves inside some stranger’s stomach
Place your body here
Let your skin begin to blend itself with mine

Popularity: 26% [?]

Portrait (Stoya), 1986
© Thomas Ruff

Untitled (A face devoid of love or grace,)
by Emily Dickinson

A face devoid of love or grace,
A hateful, hard, successful face,
A face with which a stone
Would feel as thoroughly at ease
As were they old acquaintances –
First time together thrown.

Popularity: 16% [?]

(from “The Democratic Forest”)
© William Eggleston

Cucurrucucú Paloma
by Caetano Veloso (originally by Tomás Méndez)

They say that at night he did nothing but cry.
They that he didn’t eat and did nothing but drink.
They swear that heaven itself shuddered when it heard his cry,
How he suffered for her, calling out to her even as he died.

“Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay,” he sang.
“Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay,” he wept.
“Ay, ay, ay, ay, ay,” he sang.
As he died of mortal passion.

That a sad dove early in the morning comes to sing to him,
To the small house with its little doors open wide.
They swear that the dove is none other than his soul,
That he however is still waiting for her to come back, she, the wretched.

Cucurrucucú, dove,
Cucurrucucú, don’t cry.
The stones never cry, dove,
What do they know of love?

Cucurrucucú, cucurrucucú,
Cucurrucucú, don’t cry any more.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Untitled (from “Family Photos, 1984-1992”)
© Doug Dubois

I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone
by Richard Brautigan

I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago. You don’t look like any girl I’ve ever seen before.

I couldn’t say “Well she looks just like Jane Fonda, except that she’s got red hair, and her mouth is different and of course, she’s not a movie star…”

I couldn’t say that because you don’t look like Jane Fonda at all.

I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or 42, somewhere in there. I think I was seven, or eight, or six.

It was a movie about rural electrification, a perfect 1930’s New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids. The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn’t have any appliances like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn’t listen to the radio. They built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.

There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.

Then the movie showed electricity like a young Greek god, coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life. Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch, the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings. The farmer’s family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.

It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to the Star Spangled Banner, or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt, or hearing him on the radio “... the President of the United States… ”

I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio….

And that’s how you look to me.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Woman on Bus, Lithuania, 2001 (from “Buses”)
© Andrew Miksys

The Fault of It
by Ezra Pound

Some may have blamed us that we cease to speak
Of things we spoke of in our verses early,
Saying: a lovely voice is such as such;
Saying: that lady’s eyes were sad last week,
Wherein the world’s whole joy is born and dies;
Saying: she hath this way or that, this much
Of grace, this way or that, this much
Of grace, this little misericorde;
Ask us no further word;
If we were proud, then proud to be so wise
Ask us no more of all the things ye heard;
We may not speak of them, they touch us nearly.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Tricia and Curtis, 2005 (from “Niagara”)
© Alec Soth

Love Song
by Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell trans.)

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin’s bow,
which draws one voice out of two seperate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

Popularity: 13% [?]

This may be a bit obvious again, but nonetheless I give you Larry Sultan paired with one of my favorites poets of all time, E.E. Cummings. If I continue with this, you’ll be seeing more Cummings for sure.

(from “Pictures From Home”)
© Larry Sultan

if there are any heavens my mother… (XLIII)
by E.E. Cummings

if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be(deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my

(suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)

Popularity: 15% [?]

Upon reading Bertolt Brecht’s poem Rembrances of Marie A. (you may recognize this as being briefly featured in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s beautiful film The Lives of Others), I found myself thinking of an image by Johan Bergström.

This the start of a new series of posts I call “Phoetry” – pairing photographs with poetry. This is not weekly, or even monthly… it’s just when it feels fit. And I wouldn’t expect future posts to be as literal as this one seems to be. Enjoy!

After Rain Comes Sun, 2007 (from “Nostalgia”)
© Johan Bergström

Remembrances of Marie A.
by Bertolt Brecht (Scott Horton trans.)

1
On a certain day in the blue-moon month of September
Beneath a young plum tree, quietly
I held her there, my quiet, pale beloved
In my arms just like a graceful dream.
And over us in the beautiful summer sky
There was a cloud on which my gaze rested
It was very white and so immensely high
And when I looked up, it had disappeared.

2
Since that day many, many months
Have quietly floated down and past.
No doubt the plum trees were chopped down
And you ask me: what’s happened to my love?
So I answer you: I can’t remember.
And still, of course, I know what you mean
But I honestly can’t recollect her face
I just know: there was a time I kissed it.

3
And that kiss too I would have long forgotten
Had not the cloud been present there
That I still know and always will remember
It was so white and came from on high.
Perhaps those plum trees still bloom
And that woman now may have had her seventh child
But that cloud blossomed just a few minutes
And when I looked up, it had disappeared in the wind.

Popularity: 12% [?]