A Kitchen of Clouds

As the fireman said:

Don’t book a room over the fifth floor

in any hotel in New York.

They have ladders that will reach further

but no one will climb them.

As the New York Times said:

The elevator always seeks out

the floor of the fire

and automatically opens

and won’t shut.

These are the warnings

that you must forget

if you’re climbing out of yourself.

If you’re going to smash into the sky.

Many times I’ve gone past

the fifth floor,

cranking upward,

but only once

have I gone all the way up.

Sixtieth floor:

small plants and swans bending

into their grave.

Floor two hundred:

mountains with the patience of a cat,

silence wearing its sneakers.

Floor five hundred:

messages and letters centuries old,

birds to drink,

a kitchen of clouds.

Floor six thousand:

the stars, skeletons on fire,

their arms singing.

And a key,

a very large key,

that opens something —

some useful door —

somewhere —

up there.

Riding the Elevator Into the Sky,
- Anne Sexton (1975)

source

Looks and Brain

Marilyn reading James Joyce.

Photographed by Eve Arnold .

Long Island, 1954

"We worked on a beach on Long Island…I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time). She she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it–but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively. When we stopped at a local playground to photograph she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her".