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

The language of the road

"The ocean ends, like life and vision, at a horizon that is the fault of the curvature of eye and earth, with no proof of true end at all." -Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler’s Dictionary

Image: Found, Marble paper 
Title: from Mohammed Bennis’s Seven Birds

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"

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”

At First I Knew it Not

There is the paper and then there is the person.

-Francesca Woodman (NY Review of Books)

Image: Found 
Title: Currer Bell

What do I make of all this texture?

“‘Some days I feel like playing it smooth,’ I said, ‘and some days I feel like playing it like a waffle iron.’” 

-Raymond Chandler, Trouble is My Business

Image: Found

Title: Nod to Annie Dillard

Trembling Emblems

Life is it’s own rescue, for we — at our supremest, are but it’s trembling Emblems
 

-Emily Dickinson

[Note: I've replaced Dickinson's love for life]

Image: Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970