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

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

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

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

A Word

I used to think when I turned thirty I would become a writer.

Thirty passed.

I wrote here then, daily. Poems. Essays. Words like leaves on a page curling, turning over in the wind.

I wrote before that, too. Decades before: shelves, walls, boxes of words.

I didn't know what blogger meant. Monetize, followers, trolls.

And then erasure happened.

It swept.

My knees became my feet, my eyes like the closing flowers, unseen.

I have dwelt in caves dripping.

Time has passed. The sun is higher.

I write.
I want you to know I am still writing.

Yes, my answer will always be yes,

I am writing.

Image: John Bridges, Embrace
Text: Terresa Wellborn

How Far is Far?

    In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

  -May Sarton

  Image: Richard Avedon, 1968
  Title: From a book by Alvin Tresselt and Ward Brackett

I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move

     We are pressed flowers in heavy books.

-Andrea Gibson

Image: Unknown (India)

Title: Georgia O’Keefe 

Looking from outside into an open window

“I think that poems that have direct meanings—that’s a very dull poet, an extremely dull poet, and a person who is writing like he or she sees. That isn’t what you’re ever writing. You never write what you see. You see it, you just don’t write it. You write something else. And there’s always something else.”

-Barbara Guest
Image: Cristian Schloe, Portrait of a Heart
Title: Charles Baudelaire, Windows

Blind as we are to Seeing

     All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

  -Steven Millhauser


Image: Claudia Drake, Moira, 2007
 

Title: Miguel Hernández

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

Being or nothing, that is the question

      We are never real historians, but always near poets... 

   -Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Image: Federico Hurtado, Portraits Without Masks
Title: Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the Metro

The sound keeps coming out of the flowers

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from 

 

coming.”
 

-Pablo Neruda

Image: Spike Mafford, the black dots spell out the title, The 

Meadow
 

Title: Basso

Every Extravagance at Once

    "To create something like a poem, means that the outside world of an artist and the internal drives within her blend and blur."

     -Dorothea Lasky, Poetry is Not a Project

Image: found
Title: Rilke, from The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams, trans. by Damion Searls

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake

    On foot
I wandered through the solar systems,
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already I have a sense of myself.
Somewhere in space my heart hangs,
emitting sparks, shaking the air,
to other immeasurable hearts.

     -Edith Irene Södergran, “On Foot I Wandered Through the Solar Systems” 

Image: Annie Vought, i took the girl to walk in circles, (paper cut letters)
Title: Wallace Stevens

An expression of poetry that was lost

the invisible thing inside
circling
     glass
     on its voyage out
     to the heart

-Michael Ondaatje, “*(Insomnia)” from the collection The Cinnamon Peeler

Image: Louise Bourgeois, The Insomnia Drawings, 2000
Title: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Liquefaction

    I blame the twilight for coming too soon,
not allowing enough time for you
to drown without dying. And now
the water boatmen skate on the skin
of water, we should have practiced
how to breathe. Instead we undressed
each other slowly: middle names, first
loves, spiders, toads and newts. Taking our
time to visit every corner, all the while
knowing we would soon run out of self.
I want to ignore the silver scar
on your left retina: the imprint of an iceberg.
Those places you were yearning for: Bermuda,
Pacific, Icelandic waters. Confident diver
that you are, land was never your best side.
What remains is the space around
your hands, their quietness, and at the tips
of fingers the fain hum of blue.

-Saradha Soobrayen, “On the water meadows

Image 1: Max Ernst, Air washed in water (L’air lavé à l’eau), 1973

Image 2: Map: The Grand Circle

A sharp-edged throne, a great arsenic lobster

Language is not transparent.

Image: Mel Bochner
Title: García Lorca, from Theory and Play of the Duende (obviously)

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

There is a language older by far and deeper than words

 

 

 

"The very function of poetry is to be as universal as possible, 

 

and that demands that we rectify, simplify, enlarge our lived 

 

experience, so that our words have properties that make them 

 

on the whole comprehensible and lived anew—the reader must 

 

understand that what is obscure in the poem proves that words 

 

should not be reduced to a game of concepts, which in turn 

 

would engender ideology, death. It is not a question of 

 

understanding a poem concept by concept, for that would mean 

 

tearing it away from its basis, which is not thought but 

 

experience.”

—Yves Bonnefoy

Image: James Glaisher, Travels in the Air, 1871
Title: Derrick Jensen

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”