winter flowers ii.

                                                                
                                                                                         orchid flowers

winter flowers i.

                                                                                                     sunflower

from "The Winter Flowers" by Brian Brett

     This house is a jungle thick with shivering green that
slows a man down. This house fills the brittle heart with the
sharp shoots of spring even when the snow sings heavy
through the outside evergreens.

“Once the soul was perfect and had wings and could soar into heaven as only creatures can. But the soul lost its wings and fell to earth, there it took an earthly body, and now while it lives in this body no outward sign of wings can be seen, yet the roots of its wings are still there and the nature of these is to try to raise the earthbound soul into heaven. When you see a beautiful woman or a man, the soul remembers the beauty it used to know in heaven and the wings begin to sprout and makes the soul want to fly but it cannot yet, the man is still too weak, so the man keeps staring at the sky like a young bird. He has lost all interest in the world around him." from Plato's The Phaedrus (and Terrence Malick's movie, Knight of Cups.)

"This is the prime reality —
Bird and man, the individual
Discriminate, the self evalued
Actual, the operation
Of infinite, ordered potential..."

from "The Phoenix and the Tortoise" by Kenneth Rexroth