When I lean over the chasm of myself

    We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.

    -Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Image: Found here
Title: Rilke, from The Book of Hours I, 3

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

This forest of letters

   You speak, and suddenly you are a thousand words standing up.

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

Image: Found
Title: Susan Howe, “Personal Narrative” (Souls of the Labadie Tract, 2007)

The Heart’s Portrait

Image: The O of the famous “Love” sculpture, by Robert Indiana, being lowered into place @ Fifth Avenue and 60th Street, Nov. 29, 1971 

Title: Emily Dickinson, The Letters of Emily Dickinson

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

The map has been barely marked

Driving takes hold of the left brain and then the right brain is 

 

freed—that’s what some writer friends and I have theorized. 

 

But I can’t always stop when I get an idea. It depends on the 

 

road— North Dakota, no traffic. When I’m driving on a very 

 

 

empty stretch of road I do write with one hand. It’s hardly 

 

legible, but still, you don’t want to have to stop every time.” 
 

 

-Louise Erdrich

Note: Yes.
Post Note: As unimpressed as I have been with Erdrich's writing (several attempts, half-finished readings, abandoned books bedside), this quote sings.

Image: Shoji Ueda, Winter 3
Title: Gerald Murnane, Inland

Anaesthetizing the sky

Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

-C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

   Image: Ingvar Kenne from the series Landscapes Deconstructed 
Title: Samantha Wynne Rhydderch, from “Understanding the Echo”

A small spot on the astronomer’s retina

   When the child was a child, it didn’t know that it was a child, everything was soulful, and all souls were one.

-Peter Handke

Image: Vivian Maier, Untitled (Boy in Mirror), 1950s
Title: adapted from Ted Kooser from "After Years"

I have left out the way loss changes one’s tread upon the earth

  When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads of life: if you go right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you’ll eat the wolves; if you go straight, you’ll eat yourself.

-Anton Chekov, Fatherless

Image: Gregory Popovitch
Title: Gail Caldwell, A Strong West Wind

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)

I have a sort of sea-feeling

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

-Inscription on a Carthaginian funerary urn
Image: Found
Title: Herman Melville

Opacity

  Tristram Shandy does not want to be born, because he does not want to die. Every means and every weapon is valid to save oneself from death and time. If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fated and inevitable points, digressions will lengthen it; and if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and tortuous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows - perhaps death may not find us, perhaps time will lose its way, and perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places.

-Carlo Levi

Images: Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Gottfried Wiegand, Compagnie Willi Dorner

In the vast world or in the immense past

… the silence
Holds with its gloved hand
The wild hawk of the mind.

— R. S. Thomas, excerpt from “The Untamed” 

Images: Found; Edward Curtis
Title: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

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

Come, young rain of tears

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.
-Ernest Hemingway


Image: Alexis Arnold, Crystalized books
Title:  Rolf Jacobsen

New Year's Resolution 2013

Image: Laurence Demaison
Quote: Rilke, from The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams, trans. by Damion Searls

The Veins that used to run

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“My soul is in the sky.”

-Shakespeare, 
 

A Midsummer Night's Dream

 

Image: Erich Buchwald Zinnwald
Title: Emily Dickinson, excerpt from I’ve dropped my Brain — My Soul is numb, (#1046)

A Grotesque and Magnificent Inferno

Estimated number of fireflies it would take to generate the visible brightness of the sun: 14,286,000,000.

-Professor Cole Gilbert, Cornell University

Title: Alexander Blok
Image: Robert Rausschenberg, Mother of God, 1950 

Which I is I?

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. 

-Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here”
Image: Flickr / francyvieste
Title: Theodore Roethke, from “In A Dark Time”

An orgy of loose ends

   "…There is some line running through her body like a wick....I’m trying to understand what it means to have had a life."

-Mary Gordon

Title: Via Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan

Image: Sebastião Salgado, Full View of the Serra Pelada Gold Mine, Brazil, 1986

The untrimmable light of the world

    The ‘second sight’ possessed by the Highlanders in Scotland is actually a foreknowledge of future events. I believe they possess this gift because they don’t wear trousers. That is also why in all countries women are more prone to utter prophecies.

-Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

Image: Fergus Feehily
Title: Mary Oliver, from the poem "Mindful"

Consider incompleteness as a verb

That uncrossable gulf between home and away.

-Steve Himmer, excerpt from The Importance of Unwritten Postcards

Image: Plate photographed through tissue. The frontispiece to The Giant-Killer: or, The Battle Which All Must Fight, by A.L.O.E. (Charlotte Maria Tucker, 1856). Original from Oxford University. Digitized July 12, 2006.
Title: Anne Carson, Plainwater

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