These fragments I have shored against my ruins. -T.S. Eliot

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.  -T.S. Eliot
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Sunday, February 2, 2020

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

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

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

Friday, September 7, 2018

Say what you see in the dark























There were once words here,
now they are lost.
 

Fear, that ghost.
 

-Terresa Wellborn

And this:

"Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark."


-Wallace Stevens

Image: Katia Chausheva

Sunday, August 14, 2016

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

Sunday, June 1, 2014

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

Monday, April 28, 2014

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

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

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 

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

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

Saturday, November 9, 2013

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

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Out of sheer wonderment























“Our hands full or not:
 
The same abundance.
 
Our eyes open or shut:
 
The same light.” 
 
-Yves BonnefoyThe Curved Planks: Poems


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

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Being or nothing, that is the question

























      We are never real historians, but always near poets... 
   -Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space




Image: Federico Hurtado, Portraits Without Masks
Title: Raymond Queneau, Zazie in the Metro

Thursday, April 4, 2013

The sound keeps coming out of the flowers





“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from 
 
coming.”
 
-Pablo Neruda

Image: Spike Mafford, the black dots spell out the title, The 
Meadow
 
Title: Basso

Monday, March 18, 2013

Every Extravagance at Once


























    "To create something like a poem, means that the outside world of an artist and the internal drives within her blend and blur."
     -Dorothea Lasky, Poetry is Not a Project


Image: found
Title: Rilke, from The Inner Sky: Poems, Notes, Dreams, trans. by Damion Searls

Thursday, February 21, 2013

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 Voughti took the girl to walk in circles, (paper cut letters)
Title: Wallace Stevens




Tuesday, February 12, 2013

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

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

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

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

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)

Monday, January 14, 2013

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

Saturday, December 8, 2012

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

Thursday, December 6, 2012

The poem is not a vehicle, it is an act of transportation



























Tourists don’t know where they have been. Travelers don’t 
 
know where they are going.
 
 
-Paul Theroux

Image: Otto Steinert

Title: Eliot Weinberger, “The River”