Everything is

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, p. 23 [translated by M.D. Herter Norton]

Photo: Inge Morath, Courtyard and portal, Masjid-e Shah, Isfahan, Iran, 1956

My postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face

"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.”

-Carlos Fuentes, RIP (November 11, 1928 – May 15, 2012)

Image: Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek, drawing of a microscopic section through one year old ash wood

Title: Nod to Anne Sexton

It is commonly thought

It is commonly thought that everything that is can be put into words.
-Agnes Martin

Image: matchbook

When the words become palpable

Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands

and keeps it.

—Lorine Niedecker

Image: Adolf Wölfli, Rosalia Walther, Owner of the Grand-Hotel on Mount Neveranger, 1911

Title: Nod to John Ashbery

The Radical of Writing

“Write about what you don't know about what you know.”
―Eudora Welty

Image: Yto Barrada, Family Tree, 2009

The Physicality of Writing

I discovered the tongue and the lips of my heart. Since then I have not had a mouth.

—Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

Photo:  Edward S. Curtis

The Unsaid

I used to put words here
(1,095 days worth);
I still do, only now
they are rarely mine.

Image: Michaël Borremans, Various ways of avoiding visual contact with the outside world using yellow isolating tape, 1998

Nota Bene

[Footnotes, subtext are everything.]

Photo: Random, found

I am Constantly Writing

"The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself."

-Robert Walser

Art: Ernst Fuchs

I Begin Everywhere at Once

"I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me." —Elias Canetti

Have I said this before? Most likely. 

I've arrived, remained, left, only to leave again and return. Which is coming and which is going? I tend to confuse the two. A decision, then. Instead of mourning the time, the oddities, the surrounding infinite of things, I will write. 

Photo: Zion National Park, Utah. Cross-bedded Navajo Sandstone on Checkerboard Mountain along the Zion-Mount Carmel road. Circa 1946.