Oh, but it is dirty!
– this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!

Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.

Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.

Some comic books provide
the only note of color–
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.

Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)

Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO–SO–SO–SO

to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.

Filling Station
Elizabeth Bishop

The dreams of the young. I once wanted to study Elizabeth Bishop. And that was all I wanted for myself. Now I want so much more. Yet I’m unable to specify one.

The dreams of the young remain with them.

I HAVE A CRAZY

Crazy love of things.
I like pliars,
and scisssors.
I love
cups
rings
and bowls -
not to speak, of course,
of hats.
I love
all thing,
not just
the grandest,
also
the infinite
ly
small-
thimbles,
spurs,
plates,
and flower vases.

Oh yes.

Amo las cosas loca,
locamente.

Ode To Things (oda a las cosa)
Pablo Neruda

Did you notice how smart the enamel drinking jar is? I’m not surprised if people in the past, at a certain moment in time, was smarter than us today. Oh yes. Amo las cosas loca, locamente.

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You cannot play things as they are.’

The man replied, ‘Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’

And they said then, ‘But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.’

The Blue Guitar
Wallace Stevens

If you repeat this over and aloud and hear yourself in the crack, you will.
If not, Stevie’s Vintage Lingerie is quite uplifting.

We use this book to prop up a light at the window display, not because it is not good, but because it has the potential to look salacious. Of course it is for sale.

Ah, Love, you smell of petroleum
and overwork
with grease on your fingernails,
paint in your hair
there is a pained look in your eye
from no appreciation
you speak to me of the lilacs
and appleblossoms we ought to have
the banquets we should be serving,
afterwards rubbing each other for hours
with tenderness and genuine
olive oil
someday. Meantime here is your cracked plate
with spaghetti. Wash your hads &
touch me, praise
my cooking. I shall praise your calluses.
We shall dance in the kitchen of our imagination.

by Judy Grahn
‘Ah, Love, you smell of petroleum’

(taken from What Sappho Would Have Said)

From between the ’50s to the ’70s, browse the rest of our vintage lingerie if you are one to mind what’s naked to the eye. I also know they are even better to take out of the intended context of lingerie dressing, to unintended dressing!

If I love you -
I never behave like a climbing trumpet vine
Using your high branches to show off;
If I love you -
I never mimic infatuated little birds
Repeating monotonous songs into the shadows,
Nor do I look at all like  wellspring
Sending out its cooling consolation all year round,
Or just another perilous crag
Augmenting your height, setting off your prestige.
Nor like the sunlight
Or even spring rain.
No, these are not enough.
I would be a kapok tree by your side
Standing with you – both of us shaped like trees.
Our roots hold hands underground,
Our leaves touch in the clouds.
As a gust of wind passes by
We salute each other
And not a soul
Understands our language.
You have your bronze boughs and iron trunk
Like knives and swords,
Also like halberds;
I have my red flowers
Like heavy sighs,
Also like heroic torches.
We hare cold waves, storms and thunderbolts;
Together we savor fog, haze and rainbows.
We seem to always live apart,
But actually depend upon each other forever.
This has to be called extraordinary love.
Faith resides in it:
Love -
I love not only your sublime body
But the space you occupy
The land beneath your feet.

by Shu Ting
March 27, 1977
Poetry Magazine (Shikan), no. 5 (May 1982)

The above poem is from The Red Azalea: Chinese Poetry since the Cultural Revolution, available in Stevie’s book section. This poem hast to be one of the most beautiful poems I’ve come across in a while. Maybe it’s because I haven’t been reading poetry for too long; a cluttered head does not know the grass, the ocean, the land beneath the feet. Or maybe I like the outburst of romance and nature, undifferentiated. These are the best lines for me:

I have my red flowers
Like heavy sighs,
Also like heroic torches.

It’s like looking and seeing.

The three ships-in-the-bottle we have in Stevie… do you like them as much as I do? I don’t know who will want to buy them, but I keep looking out for them. Everywhere!

Above is a small ceramic wall vase of a pair of deers, and a ‘secret’ drawer made out of a tree stump…
Below is a really old deep trinket case that springs open when you unclasp it, and a sprightly Old Spice Brilliantine glass container.

You can’t really tell from the photo but this curio cupboard is a lovely small size, well, the width of two bedside clocks, and the old wooden trinket case below is smaller than your palm.

I love not only your sublime body
But the space you occupy
The land beneath your feet.

I tried to forget about them
yet the days…

I am older now and still a child
but time is a thirsty germ.

I have one year left to play in this lot
and am afraid.

Some people think about
what they do

or the school they are to lose.
Others just let a river go by.

I never see what I am looking at.
I see what I think.

At night life is blue waves,
piers with stairs going down,

people who jump off and frighten
fish who swim away,

boy who dive from the top of the rail.
This is my real life.

Time
Aliki Barnstone

She was eleven when she wrote this, how true is the eye if left to be child. Taken from the book The Real Tin Flower, and I must admit I got this old book because I wondered why would someone I’ve not heard of have a foreword by Anne Sexton. The poems in The Real Tin Flower are accompanied by illustrations, of a time frozen behind my eye. Here are some of the vintage needlepoint work Stevie has started to collect. You see, ever since the world could snarl and sneer, she could also smooth and smile.

If you, like me, see unparalleled joy in these woody picture frames, come down to Stevie. Or watch our collection grow

And then some.

I turn to Mary Oliver’s poetry a lot, now that I’m not in school and school no longer reminds me how to read. School now reminds me of why I didn’t break the rules sooner. Maybe one day I can write again.

Here is a poem of hers, for those of us who run because we cannot fly.

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean -
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

Many times she takes the words out of my heart. Then I have an eagerness to be clouted by poetry, and in the next second equally let down by poetry. This ebb is not uncertain. It is certainty that frightens me.

Oh Alice, Alice, Alice, the world will never know!

How will they know
What they want to know,
When time is the snatch thief;
Memory,
a leaf.

Charles Bukowski, Pablo Neruda, Virginia Woolf’s short fiction, a Daniel Johnston book, a quick history guide for graphics, A.A. Milne and a couple of other poetry books – these are the books we have sold randomly. When the tenants upstairs moved away, we recycled some of their old cupboards into a mini bookshelf, fit for the tiny library of titles we have in store.

Is it not a wonder that a city such as ours does not have a decent secondhand bookstore anywhere? Sunny Bookshop or Silverkris do not count! And the names of other shops I forget are the same, all stocking bestseller or easy-to-read titles…

cos sometimes we do not want to buy new books.

YOU do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver