parfois l'oiseau arrive vite...*

"attendre s'il le faut pendant des années

la vitesse ou la lenteur de l'arrivée de l'oiseau

n'ayant aucun rapport

avec la réussite du tableau...

...alors vous arrachez tout doucement

une des plumes de l'oiseau

et vous écrivez votre nom dans un coin du tableau."*

[*selected lines excerpted from 'Pour faire le Portrait d'un oiseau' by Jacques PREVERT, Selections from 'PAROLES', 1965]

BONNE ANNEE A TOUS!  

[chirps the sweet little bird from the Jardin du Luxembourg]

 

prophypousses

 la hauteur de ses conceptions... être logé aux quartre vents...

[spouting soft phallic-sprouts on the lawn of the Palais Royal]

l'éminence verte

a jagged thread of sun stitches together furtive shadows below...

the voluminous gowns above enlace in a symmetrical row...

a light wind sways their regal skirts, and l'air varié intersperses... 

softly the courtyard of the palais royal, still undulating eminences...

l'involucre vert

 a whirling man-boy...breaking out of his pod...shaded by notre dame...

paris is his husk...

"this plant would like to grow and yet be embryo; increase, and yet escape the doom of taking shape; be vaguely vast, and climb to the tip end of time with all of space to fill, like boundless Igdrasil that has the stars for fruit."*

[*3rd verse from "Seed Leaves" by Richard WILBUR, 1921-]

continuum...

there is a tree in Paris that is a testament to the tarrying nexus of time, to the soffit spectrum of survival spiralling through hundreds of millions of years...
the end of another year has me thinking of this singular tree, as I had once watched its leaves radiate a glowing yellow before spinning wordlessly down to the ground...
I picked up a few of these gilded leaves so perfectly bifurcated and so strangely primordial, their cell structure interlaced with mysterious knowledge from so long ago when the world had no human eyes, no human touch...
China has since claimed it as her national tree, but I claim it as poetic justice that it may just keep going on long after countries and people have dissolved away like so many new year's resolutions!

"Dieses Baums Blatt, der von Osten
Meinem Garten anvertraut,
Gibt geheimen Sinn zu kosten,
Wie's den Wissenden erbaut."*

[*first verse of "Gingo Biloba" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1815]
[this particular gingko biloba specimen flourishes in the park beside the Petit Palais]

Je vous souhaite de joyeuses fêtes ainsi qu'une belle et sage année 2010!

lilolila

crumpled-up silver net clouds loom over a rambling open post and beam walkway awkwardly hung with sheets of colour-splotched graffiti like so much drying laundry flapping in the breeze on this little island of green relief...
on a small corner lot on rue de Belleville, an experiment in democratic design within a neighbourhood garden has been implemented by L'association l'îlot-lilas...
based on the theories of artist/architect Yona Friedman, a very loose hanging "museum of graffiti" was installed as a participative project to encourage local residents to effect change in their own environment... redefining their public spaces as they see fit and evolving them according to their needs...
[or devolving into organizational chaos, as some might grumble...!]

[295, rue de Belleville]

l'état herbu

lush grasslands at the musée du quai branly soothe the spirits protecting the primitive artifacts installed within the newest jean nouvel designed museum on the seine...art and artifacts from ancient cultures to remind us that animism creates a more empathetic world...

home on the seine

along the scenic seine the more privileged homeless occupy prime riverfront real estate in neat and orderly tents with a view of the exclusive ile saint-louis and the grandiose hôtel lambert where voltaire was once taken in and thereby saved from a similar humbler fate...