By Jose Santos Chocano
Translated by Alice Stone Blackwell
Freaks of bright crystal, airy beauties
Whose enigmatic forms amaze the eye—
Crowns fit to deck Apollo's brows on high,
Ornaments meet for halls of splendor rare!
They spring from knots in tree-trunks, rising there
In sweet gradation; winding wondrously,
They twist their serpent stems, and far and night
Hang overhead like wingless birds in the air.
Lonely, like pensive heads, all fetterless,
Lofty and free they bloom; by no dull chain
Their flowers to any tyrant root are bound;
Because, they too, at war with pettiness,
Desire to live, like souls that know no stain,
Without one touch of contact with the ground.
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Wednesday was quite cold -- around freezing, but the wind chill was much lower -- so it's just as well I had online chats in the afternoon, though we did take a walk that made me realize I need better touchscreen gloves. I opened some more boxes of books we haven't seen in several years in the morning, put some on shelves, put some in a pile to go through and decide if we really want to keep them, and hung three paintings in stairwells, then we ate lunch and I chatted with my high school friends. In the early evening I watched some Rings of Power with Cel and Laurie, the start of the Sauron/Celebrimbor romance, which I love.
Then we ate dinner and watched The Masked Singer's Star Trek night, which was very fun -- the audience was dressed as if they were at a convention, the judges were in costume (Rita Ora as Seven of Nine, Robin Thicke as Captain Pike). After that, we watched Tim's Vermeer, which and her husband had suggested; it's about an Emmy-winning graphics expert who believed Johannes Vermeer must have used mirrors and lenses to create greater verisimilitude in his art and set out to prove it by copying his painting. From Tower Hill Botanic Garden, some of the orchids and aerial art by Cicely Carew in Elevated:
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