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

Still unknowing, unwise

   "…Wondered what to do; even, how to do anything at all."

  -Stanley Crawford, Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine

Image: Rodney Smith
Title: Stanley Crawford

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

My Own Desert Places

     "For the desert is simply that:… an ecstatic form of disappearance."

  -Jean Baudrillard

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   "You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don’t ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors."

-Kōbō Abe

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You are there
for an instant Blue desert
with dunes of rain Thirst is granted
Space is a breach You burn in the night
whose walls are down I see by your oil
by the wick in the middle where a flame blossoms

-Edmond Jabès, excerpt from “After the Deluge,” If There Were Anywhere but Desert: The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabès

Image: Max Scheler, Art Class for Retired Ctizens, Sun Valley, Arizona, 1962
Title: Robert Frost, “Desert Places”

That Very Elsewhere

The mad state is, as he emphasizes over and over again, empty.
Teeming with emptiness. Knotted on emptiness. Immodest in its
emptiness. You can pull emptiness out of it by the handful.
“I am not here. I am not here and never will be.”
You can pull it out endlessly.

Anne Carson, from Semaine d’Artaud 

Image: James Kao, Tablescape, 2004
Title: Judith Butler on “the poetics of non-arrival,” excerpt from Who Owns Kafka?