There is a strong shadow where there is much light

 

   Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see

  in the dark.

   — Wallace Stevens

Image: Felix Bonfils

Title: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Götz von Berlichingen

Memory insists with its sea voice

 

There is really nothing more to say except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.

- Toni Morrison

 

 Image: Graciela Iturbide

Title: Anne Michaels, The Weight of Oranges

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