The things I discovered while I was looking for something else

"If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry." 

-Stephen Spender

Image: Mark Hartman
Title: Shelby Foote

I felt myself vanishing into blue

 

       "In water, like in books—you can leave your life."                   

       -Lidia Yuknavitch

Title: Steven Millhauser

Image: Paul Klee, Hilterfingen, 1895

Unfathomable Cities

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

-Rilke

Image: Irene Suchocki

Words Hazard All

              I’ve never thought of counting words. I’d rather not

              know.
-Iris Murdoch

      Title: Ronald Johnson

Not Waving but Drowning

Drowning men, it is said, cling to wisps of straw.
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
 
Image: Arthur Siegel, Study of Negative/Positive Profiles, c.1937
Title: Stevie Smith