I am the Stranger

    We are living in a foreign country.
    -Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions

Image: Edward S. Curtis, Chaiwa, a Tewa Indian girl with a butterfly whorl hairstyle, 1922

Title: quote from Edmond Jabès

There is a strong shadow where there is much light

 

   Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see

  in the dark.

   — Wallace Stevens

Image: Felix Bonfils

Title: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen

Memory insists with its sea voice

 

There is really nothing more to say except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

- Toni Morrison

 

 Image: Graciela Iturbide

Title: Anne Michaels, The Weight of Oranges

It is not for us to follow the trail of truth too far, since by doing so we entirely loses the directing compass of our mind

 

 

 

 

 

"Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by."

-St. Augustine, from Confessions

 

Image: Georgia O’Keeffe, Road - Mesa with Mist, 1961

Title: adapted from Herman Melville, Pierre

All the ladders in the world

 

Ars Poetica

For a while I climbed the ladder,
not realizing I’d placed it
against the wrong house. The window
I tried to look into was a mirror.
I fell backward into the world.

-Stephen Dunn

 

Image: Lukas Schnitzer, Vöstung Sadtwar, Hungary 1665

Title: adapted from Richard Garcia, “Ladders”

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

We are what suns and winds and waters make us

Image: Richard Leach, 7 Words, Distressed page from old poetry book on playing card.


Title: Found in The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1904

Accepting that blur

so knowing,
what is known?
that we carry our baggage
in our cupped hands
when we burst through
the waters of our mother.
that some are born
and some are brought
to the glory of this world.
that it is more difficult
than faith
to serve only one calling
one commitment
one devotion
in one life.
-Lucille Clifton, “Far Memory”

Image: Giovanni Boccaccio
Title: Ruth Stone

Under the tall sky of hope

the weight of this stone is longing
the curve of that tree is longing
and longing makes the lightest breeze
sigh in the tall dead bracken
-Thomas A. Clark, from “At Dusk & At Dawn”, The Path to the Sea

Image: Sibley Colliery, Pennsylvania, 1886
Title: Marin Sorescu

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

Caterpillar edging to moth

I mean, by such flightiness, something that feels unsatisfied at the center of my life – that makes me shaky, fickle, inquisitive, and hungry.  I could call it a longing for home and not be far wrong.  Or I could call it a longing for whatever supersedes, if it cannot pass through, understanding…In my outward appearance and life habits I hardly change … But at the center: I am shaking; I am flashing like tinsel.

— Mary Oliver, Long Life

Image: Chad Wys
Title: Barbara Guest, excerpt from “Passage"

Bewilderment

"I want the muddled middle to be filled with the gristle of the living.”

-Dorianne Laux +

Image: Bill Brandt, Jean Dubuffet, 1960

Much Unseen is Also Here

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 2



Image: Amy Judd
Title: Walt Whitman

The sight of morning

“A woman who writes feels too much, those trances and portents! 

As if cycles and children and islands weren’t enough; as if mourners and gossips and vegetables were never enough.

She thinks she can warn the stars.  A writer is essentially a spy. 

Dear love, I am that girl.”

-Anne Sexton

Image: Emon Toufanian
Title: W.S. Merwin

We hold clouds in our mouth

I dreamed longingly, and my thoughts wandered north….in the direction of my home, but I could only see clouds.

       -Viktor Frankl

       Title: Nathalie Handal
       Image: René Magritte, Song of the Storm, 1937

The things I discovered while I was looking for something else

"If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry." 

-Stephen Spender

Image: Mark Hartman
Title: Shelby Foote

I felt myself vanishing into blue

 

       "In water, like in books—you can leave your life."                   

       -Lidia Yuknavitch

Title: Steven Millhauser

Image: Paul Klee, Hilterfingen, 1895

Unfathomable Cities

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

-Rilke

Image: Irene Suchocki

Words Hazard All

              I’ve never thought of counting words. I’d rather not

              know.
-Iris Murdoch

      Title: Ronald Johnson

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