They would rather be trees

There are friendships like circuses, waterfalls, libraries.

-Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister

Image: Érik Desmazières for The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, 2000
Title: Margaret Atwood, Men With the Heads of Eagles

The Living Infinite

A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.

Theodore Roethke, excerpt from “The Far Field”

Image: Latefa Wiersch
Title: Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

A swarm of voluptuous moths

    Amazingly,
I am too the memory of a sword
and of a solitary, falling sun,
turning itself to gold, then gray, then nothing.
I am the one who sees the approaching ships
from harbor. And I am the dwindled books,
the rare engravings worn away by time;
the one who envies those already dead.
Stranger to be the woman who interlaces
such words as these, in some room in a house.

-adapted from Jorge Luis Borges, “I” 

Image: Christo and Jeanne Claude, Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Riehen, Switzerland, 1997-98
Photo: Wolfgang Volz
Title: Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

The poem is not a vehicle, it is an act of transportation

“Tourists don’t know where they have been. Travelers don’t 

 

know where they are going.”
 

 

-Paul Theroux

Image: Otto Steinert
Title: Eliot Weinberger, “The River”