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

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

This forest of letters

   You speak, and suddenly you are a thousand words standing up.

-Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

Image: Found
Title: Susan Howe, “Personal Narrative” (Souls of the Labadie Tract, 2007)

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

Some of the Fragments of the Afternoon

 

“ A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.”

-e. e. cummings 

Image: Sumach in Autumn (Pittsfield, Mass.) 

Title: Nod to T. S. Eliot, from "Hysteria"

A euphoria of trees

 

 

 

“Do you remember the day we wanted
to describe everything? We saw a
euphoria of trees…”
 

-Lisa Robertson

 

[Image: Lord Snowdon]