The cities are falling asleep, each in its house

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

-Mary Oliver

Image: Dmitry Anisimov 
Title: Czeslaw Milosz, from The Separate Notebooks

Say what you see in the dark

There were once words here,
now they are lost.
 
Fear, that ghost.
 
-Terresa Wellborn

And this:

"Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark."

-Wallace Stevens

Image: Katia Chausheva

Not Waving but Drowning

Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
 
Image: Arthur Siegel, Study of Negative/Positive Profiles, c.1937
Title: Stevie Smith

Interior landscapes

    Malebranche was right: we are not our own light.

-Flannery O'Connor, “Good Country People”

Image: Celestial map, found
Title: Thomas Bernhard

Or I could call it a longing

 Cianalas: homesickness, longing, loneliness, melancholy

A’ dol dhachaigh: going home(wards)

Image: Found
Title: Mary Oliver

As the result of this universal whiteness

Snow is a form of light.

-Yves Bonnefoy

Image: Cuno Amiet
Title: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Something Godlike: Both Tree and Center

 











I was left behind with the immensity of existing things…a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

-Czesław Miłosz

Image: Peter Keetman, Projektion, 1953
Title: Rilke, from The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams

We are all storytellers

“It is the sunlight, always the streaming sunlight, that matters most.”
-Barry Lopez

Image: Found
Title: Deanna Lee

Out of sheer wonderment

“Our hands full or not:
 

The same abundance.
 

Our eyes open or shut:
 

The same light.” 
 

-Yves Bonnefoy, The Curved Planks: Poems


Image: Kim Høltermand, Grundtvigs Church, 2009
Title: W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

A struggle between roots, ciphers, and shades of light

Just as music leaves itself behind, and words have to be spoken in order to effect their disappearance, one can catch a glimmer of a life itself being a glad renunciation of itself. 

-Fanny Howe

Image: Eric Marrian, Saint Germain en laye, 2009
Title: Tomas Tranströmer, "The Open"

A multi-colored strip behind peeling plaster, in separate, shining fragments

“Night thoughts have a different color than day thoughts, a 

 

different slant, more than anything else they know all the 

 

secret paths and chinks in the armor they can take advantage 

 

of to force their way into consciousness.” 
 

-Christa Wolf, City of Angels or Overcoat of Dr. Freud

Image #1: Alain Manesson Mallet, View of the moon, 1719
Image #2:  Earth Rise, Apollo 14, 1971
Title: Stanisław Lem, Hospital of the Transfiguration [What is a poem]

Naked and dressed in stars

     I was a great many far cries from myself. 

     -Gary Lutz

     Image: Lisette Model, First Reflection, New York

     Title:  Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I, trans. by Rosmarie Waldrop 

In full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and space

Like a blazing comet, I’ve traversed infinite nights, interstellar spaces of the imagination, voluptuousness and fear. I’ve been a man, a woman, an old person, a little girl, I’ve been the crowds on the grand boulevards of the capital cities of the West, I’ve been the serene Buddha of the East, whose calm and wisdom we envy. I’ve known honor and dishonor, enthusiasm and exhaustion….I’ve been the sun and the moon, and everything because life is not enough.

-Antonio Tabucchi, Dreams of Dreams and the Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa
Image: Jane Hammond. 2004.
Title: Paul Klee

A strange melancholy pervades me

     The tides are in our veins.

-Robinson Jeffers

Image: Ray K. Metzker, Pictus Interruptus

Title: Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse

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

A Grotesque and Magnificent Inferno

Estimated number of fireflies it would take to generate the visible brightness of the sun: 14,286,000,000.

-Professor Cole Gilbert, Cornell University

Title: Alexander Blok
Image: Robert Rausschenberg, Mother of God, 1950 

The untrimmable light of the world

    The ‘second sight’ possessed by the Highlanders in Scotland is actually a foreknowledge of future events. I believe they possess this gift because they don’t wear trousers. That is also why in all countries women are more prone to utter prophecies.

-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

Image: Fergus Feehily
Title: Mary Oliver, from the poem "Mindful"

The astonished places you inhabited and left

That the sun can do this to us, every one of us
that the sun can do this to everything inside
the broken light refracted through leaves.

-Peter Gizzi, “Vincent, Homesick for the Land of Pictures”


Image: Francesca Woodman, Untitled, MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, 1980
Title: Rilke, from Uncollected Poems

A miracle unfolding in the dark

The world is a miracle unfolding in the pitch dark. We are lighting candles.

-Barry Lopez

Image: Vija Celmins, 1996

Our True Face Never Speaks

 

 

[Title by Rilke]

Art: Augustus Vincent Tack, Evening, between 1934 and 1936