Smilax and duende

"...after long balance
of what there is against what might or might never be,
the never-was has dared to love me back. ..."

From "Outliving the Lyric Moment" by Leslie Adrienne Miller

Hexagram 30: The Clinging

"...I have seen leaves desist
from moving..."

From "Credo" by Andrew Zawacki

*****

And one more little bit about the fire within water.

Husks

"I don't mean to make you cry.
I mean nothing, but this has not kept you
From peeling away my body..."

From "Monologue for an Onion" by Suji Kwock Kim

Enjambment

The feather of proof

An age-wide thicket of seconds nudge
me, snag me, slow me: I’m burning back
dream-chaparral from the country of days, smudge
sun-up and sundown with this shaman’s sack
as we smoke out what’s unchanging from time.
Mirror, metal, glass and spark cache infinite
kindling—every surface, texture, rhyme,
the hot-carbon bone-baked elegy of minutes
ticking and cooling, snap-crackle-pop RGB
coals cleared from yesterday’s soot
by a gust of chained moments blown free,
pixels drifting around time’s buried root—
look: as the winged iris shutters and tracks
unsequenced grace, where nothing lacks.

Late August

"...River mist, mudbanks, and rushes mediate the dark matter
Between two tomorrows..."

From "Light By Which I Read" by Eric Pankey

Oh dear!

"...I am lost, I am
beset by literalists and narratives of the beginning and middle
and end, help me. ..."

From "inside gertrude stein" by Lynn Emanuel

N 34 / Bisectioned

"There is something dense, united, settled in the depths,
repeating its number..."

From "Unity" by Pablo Neruda
Translated by Clayton Eshleman

A divine knock-knock joke

"... O LEAVE BEHIND THE FEATHER OF PROOF!

You overestimate us. I at least have
Longed for that feather on occasion, knowing
Deep down that one must never ask for it. ..."

From "The Changing Light at Sandover" by James Merrill

Creek's edge

Where I wandered.

*****

"...What’s green will unravel..."

From "Green" by J. C. Todd

Phaseolus magic

"...a bean, captive forever
Perhaps..."

From "Happily" by Lyn Hejinian

Topology, plus flies

"Day after day, I become of less use to myself.
Like this mockingbird,
I flit from one thing to the next."

To see the linebreaks and read the whole, go to:
"After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard" by Charles Wright

Near the visitors' parking

"...making shadows
Where sunlight was, making words
Where there was only noise in the trees."

From "Looking Around, Believing" by Gary Soto

The Morning Of

The Evening After

Wind whipped hanging ferns
at the market, blue tent, clouds;
all gone as I write.

Corrugations

"...after the little vandals have tilted
toward the impossible seduction..."

From "After the Grand Perhaps" by Lucie Brock-Broido

Tempus fugit

"...Ut varias usus meditando extunderet artis paulatim. ..."
Translation: Practice and thought might gradually forge many an art.
From Georgics, Book I, line 133 by Virgil

*****

"...For a moment I am a prisoner
of the poem I am writing.
There must be an exit. ..."

From "The Starlings" by Jesper Svenbro
Translated by John Matthias and Lars-Håkan Svensson

More, a bit later / (Now.)

A few 12-hour work-days means I'll need to post fresh things later tonight...stay tuned for more pixels and (to quote Shelly) squibs.

*****




It's now later.

"There is no fear
in taking the first step
or the second ..."

From "The Blue Stairs" by Barbara Guest

Portrait of a woman

"...only sketched-in plane
after plane after plane
cantilevering upward and forever throughout space."

From "Blueprint" by Tom Sleigh

Trail-marks

"There are places where the eye can starve,
But not here. ..."

From "Those Graves in Rome" by Larry Levis

After the dance

"At the time of his seeing a hole opened—a pocket opened—
and left a space. ..."

From "Slow Waltz Through Inflatable Landscape" by Christian Hawkey

Yellow, blue, green, or No classes during the summer

"...The space we love is unwilling to remain permanently enclosed. It deploys and appears to move elsewhere without difficulty; into other times, and on different planes of dream and memory. ..."

From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

Glass apples

"...plants blossom
like ideas; light glances off the glass..."

From "3 Men: Portraits Without the Human Figure" by Deena Linnett

*****

As I scrunched myself down and up, looking for a well-composed point of view, a scruffy bearded man far back in a parking lot across the street began yelling "Go away! Go away!" at me.

So after a quick click, I went.

Pierced

"...I don’t even know what I learned,
except the possibilities of blue..."

From "Restoration" by Mary Cornish

What caught my eye

"... August and the enigma it is. ..."

From "A Path Between Houses" by Greg Rappleye

*****

What caught my eye -- the broken green and the mysteriously ordered pebbles at the edge of a train track.

What I saw once I released the pixels caught -- the used needle (upper left corner of the image.)

It makes me wonder now if the pebbles were idly lined out by someone nodding, their veins filling with murky dreams.

Sketchy people

Transformed

"... Mine, mine,
says the squirrel to the transformer,
unclear on the capacities of electricity. ..."

From "Thrown as if Fierce & Wild" by Dean Young

Picture window

"... Appearing to be silly, wisdom survives
Like tribes of superseded gods ..."

From "The Mad Potter" by John Hollander

The golden fly

If you look closely, very closely, you might see a tiny golden fly on the canna leaves.

Is it Étaín?

Infrastructure

"...the only altars
of those who’ve dropped through holes in the sidewalk
to descend to these steam tunnels rung by slick rung. ..."

From "Prologue" by Judy Jordan

Optical delusions

My gosh! Who, or what, is peeking out from under the leaves in the lower left? (Click on the pic to enlarge if you can't see the face...)

I love catching some pixels and getting a surprise!

The possibility of snakes

"... The smell of cucumber.... Her mystery roses...."

From "Heart" by Catherine Bowman

Jacob's Ladder

"...Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air. ..."

From "Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich

(If it matters, the title of this post refers to the toy, not the biblical passage.)