ELLA LEVY | art.

Today there’s supposed to be a break 
in the weather. I sound as if I care 
when I sort of don’t. 
Like weather in diaries—it always sounds 
more important than it was: “Low 
clouds today. Cold and wet.” Or 
“No rain again. Six days in a row.” 
If these were from the journal of, say, 
Herman Melville, you’d say, “Hmm, 
six days in a row. Herman sounds grim” 
and then you’d feel like him. 
And in a poem that starts “A break 
in the weather” you sense significance 
because it’s in a poem, where words 
have more significance, ho ho.
-Ron Padgett-

-ella 

“I knew that I was dying.

something in me said, go ahead, die, sleep, become as 
them, accept.
then something else in me said, no, save the tiniest 
bit.
it needn’t be much, just a spark.
a spark can set a whole forest on 
fire.

just a spark. save it.”
Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poem

-ella 

They sat on the back patio. It was dusk and the warm winds breathed in and out, like an ocean tide. She had noticed that you could bet your bottom dollar on the heavy breezes every night this time in late-August. It calmed her and felt cleansing, though it stirred all the leaves and grass around them into a waving, swaying sort of mess. Doors slammed from time to time. 
Tea lights lit up the porch, tangled up with the vines.
Her brown leather boots were propped up across his legs, and she kept craning her neck to peak round the porch ceiling to catch glimpses of the nearly Blue Moon dancing out from under shrouds of clouds.
He asked her why she insisted on always going 5 miles over the speed limit.
And sometimes she wondered if she was born with too much fire inside. 

-ella 

”..but the sun seemed immobile as if suspended by a wire.”
[Lonesome Dove]

-ella 

“And what would you say if I called you my Indian Paintbrush?”
“Why, I’d say that you were my Fairy Slipper.”
“Then it only rests to be that you are my Yellow-Poplar (Liriodendron Tulipifera)…TulipTree.”
“Well then, I suppose you’d be my Yucca Blossom.”
“And you dear, are my Rhododendron.” 

-ella 
(pictured: Flowers at my front stoop, blooming with the Full Moon. Every year they disappear and I think they’ve gone forever. They always come back.) 

Merrily merrily merrily merrily
life is but a dream.
-ella