Blue Desert with Dunes of Rain

As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.
-Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Image: Gyorgy Kepes, Juliet Kepes with Peacock Feather, 1939 +

Title: Nod to Edmond Jabès, from “After the Deluge” as found in If There Were Anywhere but Desert: The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabès

The fundamental impermanence of things

…as if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows.

-John Ashbery, Three Poems 

Image: Ann Hamilton, untitled (from Body Object series, 1984-88

Title: Maggie Nelson, Bluets