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Christmas Santa Reading Mail, Norman Rockwell (1935)

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The Two-Headed Calf

Tomorrow, when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum. But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual. Laura Gilpin

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On the other side of the water, Shitao (1694)

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Winterlandscape with a Bird-Trap, Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1631)

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The Under Voice

I saw streaming up out of the sidewalk the homeless women and men the East side of Broadway fruit and flowers and bourbon the homeless men like dull knives gray-lipped the homeless women connected to no one streaming no one to no one more like light than people, blue neon, blue the most fugitive of all the colors

Then I looked and saw our bodies not near but not far out, lying together, our whiteness

And the under voice said, Stars you are mine, you have always been mine; I remember the minute on the birth table when you were born, I riding with my feet up in the wide silver-blue stirrups, I came and came and came, little baby and woman, where were you taking me?

Everyone else may leave you, I will never leave you, fugitive. Jean Valentine

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Winter landscape with farmhouse, Esaias van de Velde (1624)

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Enjoying the Ice near a Town, Hendrick Avercamp (1620)

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Wedding, Tetyana Yablonska (1964)

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Long Time Till Spring, Ivan Marchuk (2011)

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Sound of Retreating Steps (Sergey) (Звук Удаляющихся Шагов (Cергей)), Oleg Holosiy (1991)

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Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1560)

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Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. W. H. Auden (1938)

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Summer sketch (Літній етюд), Yuriy Khymych (1952)

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La Biancheria, John Singer Sargent (1910)

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Fattened Fish and Ripe Autumn Fruit, Takeuchi Seihō (1925)

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