All the ladders in the world

 

Ars Poetica

For a while I climbed the ladder,
not realizing I’d placed it
against the wrong house. The window
I tried to look into was a mirror.
I fell backward into the world.

-Stephen Dunn

 

Image: Lukas Schnitzer, Vöstung Sadtwar, Hungary 1665

Title: adapted from Richard Garcia, “Ladders”

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

We are what suns and winds and waters make us

Image: Richard Leach, 7 Words, Distressed page from old poetry book on playing card.


Title: Found in The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1904