Something Godlike: Both Tree and Center

 











I was left behind with the immensity of existing things…a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

-Czesław Miłosz

Image: Peter Keetman, Projektion, 1953
Title: Rilke, from The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams

The language of the road

"The ocean ends, like life and vision, at a horizon that is the fault of the curvature of eye and earth, with no proof of true end at all." -Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler’s Dictionary

Image: Found, Marble paper 
Title: from Mohammed Bennis’s Seven Birds

A Word

I used to think when I turned thirty I would become a writer.

Thirty passed.

I wrote here then, daily. Poems. Essays. Words like leaves on a page curling, turning over in the wind.

I wrote before that, too. Decades before: shelves, walls, boxes of words.

I didn't know what blogger meant. Monetize, followers, trolls.

And then erasure happened.

It swept.

My knees became my feet, my eyes like the closing flowers, unseen.

I have dwelt in caves dripping.

Time has passed. The sun is higher.

I write.
I want you to know I am still writing.

Yes, my answer will always be yes,

I am writing.

Image: John Bridges, Embrace
Text: Terresa Wellborn

Still unknowing, unwise

   "…Wondered what to do; even, how to do anything at all."

  -Stanley Crawford, Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine

Image: Rodney Smith
Title: Stanley Crawford

How Far is Far?

    In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.

  -May Sarton

  Image: Richard Avedon, 1968
  Title: From a book by Alvin Tresselt and Ward Brackett

My Own Desert Places

     "For the desert is simply that:… an ecstatic form of disappearance."

  -Jean Baudrillard

   ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

   "You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don’t ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors."

-Kōbō Abe

    ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

You are there
for an instant Blue desert
with dunes of rain Thirst is granted
Space is a breach You burn in the night
whose walls are down I see by your oil
by the wick in the middle where a flame blossoms

-Edmond Jabès, excerpt from “After the Deluge,” If There Were Anywhere but Desert: The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabès

Image: Max Scheler, Art Class for Retired Ctizens, Sun Valley, Arizona, 1962
Title: Robert Frost, “Desert Places”

That Very Elsewhere

The mad state is, as he emphasizes over and over again, empty.
Teeming with emptiness. Knotted on emptiness. Immodest in its
emptiness. You can pull emptiness out of it by the handful.
“I am not here. I am not here and never will be.”
You can pull it out endlessly.

Anne Carson, from Semaine d’Artaud 

Image: James Kao, Tablescape, 2004
Title: Judith Butler on “the poetics of non-arrival,” excerpt from Who Owns Kafka?

The rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall

   I have rarely lost sight of myself; I have detested and adored myself — and so, we have grown old together.

-Paul Valéry, Selected Writings of Paul Valéry
Image: via
Title: Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

On the white page with infinite margins, the space they measure is all incantation

“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there."
-J.A. Baker, The Peregrine 


Image: Cheryle St. Onge 
Title: St. John Perse

I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother

“A novel is not a place one passes through; it is a place one inhabits.”

-Paulin Limayrac, “Du Roman acuel et de nos romanciers,” Revue des deux mondes from The Arcades Project. 

Image: Sergio Larrain, Passage Bavestrello, Valparaiso, Chili, 1952
Title: Selina Mayer

I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move

     We are pressed flowers in heavy books.

-Andrea Gibson

Image: Unknown (India)

Title: Georgia O’Keefe 

An invincible summer

    
Sometimes, a seemingly insignificant detail reveals a whole world. Like the messages hidden by spies in the dot of an i.

-Pierre Cordier

Title: Albert Camus
Image via

Looking from outside into an open window

“I think that poems that have direct meanings—that’s a very dull poet, an extremely dull poet, and a person who is writing like he or she sees. That isn’t what you’re ever writing. You never write what you see. You see it, you just don’t write it. You write something else. And there’s always something else.”

-Barbara Guest
Image: Cristian Schloe, Portrait of a Heart
Title: Charles Baudelaire, Windows

The Curt Truth

"Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation."
-Andre Gide

Image: Charles Thurston Thompson, Autoportrait, 1853
Title: Carson McCullers, from The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories

I ‘saw’ the canvas turn blue as I put the paint down

“I was always inventing stories and machinations to make sense of things I didn’t understand, and I understood almost nothing.”

-	César Aira

Image: Gerhard Richter, Iceberg in the mist

Title: Sargy Mann

Caught between the tongue and the taste

“Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are 

 

always impossible.” 
-Doris Lessing

Title: Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Image: Found

To cross the border beyond

Having been blown away
by a book
I am in the gutter
at the end of the street
in little pieces
like the alphabet

-Mary Ruefle, from "White Buttons" as found in Trances of the Blast
Title: Octavio Paz, The Double Flame
Image: Trinity Site explosion, 0.016 seconds after explosion, July 16, 1945

Blind as we are to Seeing

     All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

  -Steven Millhauser


Image: Claudia Drake, Moira, 2007
 

Title: Miguel Hernández

Under the Seams

"When you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up 

 

something."

 

-Andy Warhol

Title: Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

Image: Found

Worn thin to the width of a quill

“What do you do there, moon, in the sky? Tell me what you do, 

 

silent moon. When evening comes you rise and go 

 

contemplating wastelands; then you set.” 
 

-Giacomo Leopardi

Image: John Divola, Quarter Moon, 1987
Title: Sara Teasdale

In what distant deeps

    I wanted to live among books.

-Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
Image: Kerry Mansfield
Title: William Blake, from “The Tyger”

Deep down and deep inland

"You think I’ll be happy?" 
“Yeah, you just won’t know it.”

-	Alec Baldwin & Kevin Bacon, from the movie, She's having a baby

Image: Argyle Plaids, Left in her Wake

Title: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 87

Willing to Sail

Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe.
-Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Seashore with Shipwreck by Moonlight, 1825-30 
Title: from John Macdonald's, A Naval, Military and Political Telegraphic Dictionary, Numerically Arranged on a Very Comprehensive Scale, 1817

The silence of untranslated stars

     …you can look at something, close your eyes, and see it again and still know nothing – like staring at the sky to figure out the distances between stars.

     -Ann Beattie, Jacklighting

     Image:  Laure Albin-Guillot, Planche XVI Diatomée, 1931

               Title: e.e. cummings, adapted from "Summer Silence"

An archer in cover

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is 

 

nothing that does not require his attention.” 

-Flannery O'Connor

Picture: Flor Garduno, La pavo real (2008)
Title: Dorothy Dunnett

We are all storytellers

“It is the sunlight, always the streaming sunlight, that matters most.”
-Barry Lopez

Image: Found
Title: Deanna Lee

I was a shadow among shadows

I want to say the same words over and over. I want just the sound. I want to fill up what space I am with one note. I want to follow the note beyond my own conclusion.
-Rudy Wurlitzer

Image: Laurence Demaison, Spirite n°2, 1999 
Title: Loren Eiseley

Hymns you haven’t heard

“What one ought to capture in beauty is that which is 

 

treacherous and irresistible...” 
 

-László Krasznahorkai, War and War


Image: Adelaide Hanscom, Plate XV, 1905
Title: Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 40

Out of sheer wonderment

“Our hands full or not:
 

The same abundance.
 

Our eyes open or shut:
 

The same light.” 
 

-Yves Bonnefoy, The Curved Planks: Poems


Image: Kim Høltermand, Grundtvigs Church, 2009
Title: W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn