Crazy Stable

New carpets are replacing old ones...

at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where the crocus have run riot under my personal favorite tree, the Caucasian Wingnut,

and in the Mater's apartment, where the sorrow-saturated mauve carpet of old is rolled up for take-away by New York's Strongest, and the padding for the new stuff awaits installation.

Herewith one of the Mater's best-loved verses, with its distinctly Celtic blend of ravishing beauty and just a hint of emotional blackmail:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

W.B. Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds (1899):

Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven