Winter

How like a winter hath my absence been.

-William Shakespeare, from “Sonnet XCVII: How like a Winter hath my Absence been” +

[Photo via]

Roussel on Light

“Whatever I wrote was surrounded by rays of light,” a young Raymond Roussel told his psychoanalyst, Pierre Janet. “I used to close the curtains, for I was afraid that the shining rays emanating from my pen might escape into the outside world through even the smallest chink; I wanted suddenly to throw back the screen and light up the world.”

-Alice Gregory, from “New Impressions: Raymond Roussel and the upside of crazy” +

Art: Joseph Beuys, Untitled, 1965

It Was As If

I was lying
under a low
sky breathing
through the eye
of a needle

-W.G. Sebald

Art: Franck André Jamme, Tantra Song, Sigilio Press.

Epiphany

Today was Epiphany.

What can one add to an ineffable day?

Nothing.

January

January: it was the most beautiful of words, she’d always felt, evoking leafless trees, eared grebes, and regret.

(Text: mostly mine, with a nod to Alexander Theroux)

Photo: Dennis Hopper, Billboard, Los Angeles

How to Begin Again

"All the words are not enough to get anything said."

-Yannis Ritsos

Art: Agostino Arrivabene

I am Still Alive

Art: On Kawara from the series, I Am Still Alive

My Flight

My flight is not away, not to or from.
Rome, though in the distance, is no farther
than the dresser.
-Rod McKuen, excerpt from “Rome Itself”


Photo: via Google images

I am Tormented

"I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote."

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Map: Martin Waldseemüller, South America, detail +

Salvation

Flung, my heart unflames.

-T. © 2011. All rights reserved

Photo: Sir Arthur Eddington, Solar Eclipse, 1919

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

Mountain Redux

“Between one tree and another, there is all the thirst of the earth.”
-Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop


Tell me.
Have you ever seen woods so.
Deep so.
Every tree a word does your heart stop?
-Anne Carson, excerpt from “Town on the Way through God's Woods"

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I am in the forest. Nine thousand feet high, I'm a cloud, swathed in white; I see everything. A field of purple flowers blooms only at the apex, awaying before I utter, “Ahh.” The sun rises speckled through pines, nouns and verbs shake themselves out, rearrange: the doe's hooves, the hummingbird's sip, the black ant's crawl. Has the winding mountain pass altered them? Or the air around them changed?

No where else have I seen black mountain ants like Goliath; I imagine them gracing Dillard’s Tinker Creek, Thoreau’s Walden. They march as big as my thumb and would carry off my lunch, suitcase, cabin if allowed. Did they migrate from la selva Brazilera or the Uruguayan pampas? We sweep them off the porch and they fall back into nature's hem, unaware.

Mountains smell differently. Just as my own bed, cupboards, closets exude a musk that is me, the mountains – these Cedar ones anyway – bleed pine. Pine that registers in the nose before the brain; before the brain labels it pine it is not. It is emerald unfurling, closing over my mind's mouth. And I find, strangely, I don't seek air, only to be sucked green.

-T. @ The Chocolate Chip Waffle © 2011. All rights reserved.

Photo: Man Ray