Ovid is weeping

In the troubled depths of my memory of myself, a little child is awakening and makes the old man’s mask sob.

-René Daumal, Mount Analogue

 
Image: Josef Sudek
Title: Nod to Anne Carson, from "Short Talk on Ovid" as found in Short Talks

The primordial tower

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: Andrey Zakirzyanov,  The battle of celestial bodies, 1994

A euphoria of trees

 

 

 

“Do you remember the day we wanted
to describe everything? We saw a
euphoria of trees…”
 

-Lisa Robertson

 

[Image: Lord Snowdon]

The Endless Immensity of the Sea

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery 

Image: Akos Major

The Map or the Territory

"While ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy."
-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 87

Image: Paul Nougé, The Juggler, c. 1929-1930
Title: Nod to Michel Houellebecq

Open the window

"Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it."
-Robert Creeley



Image: Page Tsou, Feathers on the Sky

Alluvion

The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.

-Djuna Barnes, Nightwood 

Image: Richard Serra, Serpentine, 1993

I am Not Resigned

I saw, the sea was boundless, I saw no shore.

—Inscription on a Carthaginian funerary urn

Image: Eduard Bezembinder

Title: Nod to Edna St. Vincent Millay, excerpt from “Dirge Without Music”  

The Purpose of Poetry

“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”

-Czesław Miłosz

The School of Water

I hear they call life
the only refuge.

-Paul Celan

Image: Leif Podhajsky, Love, Forever Changes


Titulo: Gracias a Pablo Neruda, de “Seas,” traducido por William O’Daly

Saudade

(Portuguese): Nostalgia for what might have occurred.

 
Image: Otto Steinert, Boulevard St Michel, Paris, 1952

This Terrestrial Crust

"The frequency is courage."
-The fictional Dan Rather in the 2006–07 graphic novel Shooting War
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