It is not for us to follow the trail of truth too far, since by doing so we entirely loses the directing compass of our mind

 

 

 

 

 

"Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars, and pass themselves by."

-St. Augustine, from Confessions

 

Image: Georgia O’Keeffe, Road - Mesa with Mist, 1961

Title: adapted from Herman Melville, Pierre

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

Accepting that blur

so knowing,
what is known?
that we carry our baggage
in our cupped hands
when we burst through
the waters of our mother.
that some are born
and some are brought
to the glory of this world.
that it is more difficult
than faith
to serve only one calling
one commitment
one devotion
in one life.
-Lucille Clifton, “Far Memory”

Image: Giovanni Boccaccio
Title: Ruth Stone