photograph by Danica Tanjutco via Unsplash
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die: and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
— William Stafford, “The Way It Is”
photograph by Elijah O’Donnell via Pexels
God made thee perfet, not immutable;
And good he made thee, but to persevere
He left it in thy power…
— Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 5
photograph by Adam Winger via Unsplash
When hurrying home on a rainy night
And hearing tree-tops rubbed and tossed,
And seeing never a friendly star
And feeling your way when paths are crossed:
Stop fast and turn three times around
And try the logic of the lost.Where is the heavenly light you dreamed?
Where is your hearth and glowing ash?
Where is your love by the mellow moon?
Here is not even a lightning-flash,
And in a place no worse than this
Lost men shall wail and teeth shall gnash.Lightning is quick and perilous,
The dawn comes on too slow and pale,
Your love brings only a yellow lamp,
Yet of these lights one shall avail:
The dark shall break for one of these,
I’ve never known this thing to fail.
— John Crowe Ransom
photograph by Haydn Golden via Unsplash
The Soul selects her own Society —
Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —I’ve known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —
— Emily Dickinson
photograph by RODNAE Productions via Pexels
“When I left you I found an organ-grinder in Russell Square playing to a child; and the simple fact that there was a child listening to him, that he was giving this pleasure, entitled him, according to my theory, as you know, to some money; so I put some coppers on the ledge of his organ, without so much as looking at him, and I was going on when a woman said to me: ‘Yes sir, he do look bad, don’t he? scarcely fit like to be working.’ And then I looked at the man, and O! he was so ill, so yellow and heavy-eyed and drooping. I did not like to go back somehow , and so I gave the woman a shilling and asked her to give it to him for me. I saw her do so and walked on; but the face followed me, and so when I had got to the end of the division, I turned and came back as hard as I could and filled his hand with money — ten to thirteen shillings, I should think. I was sure he was going to be ill, you know, and he was a young man; and I dare say he was alone, and had no one to love him.”
— Letter from Robert Louis Stevenson to Mrs. Sitwell, November, 1874
photograph by Sarwer e Kainat Welfare via Pexels
“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”
— Dickens, A Christmas Carol
photograph by Matheus Bertelli via Pexels
“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination…”
— Letter from John Keats to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817
photograph by Hadwt via Unsplash
EACH life converges to some centre
Expressed or still;
Exists in every human nature
A goal,Admitted scarcely to itself, it may be,
Too fair
For credibility’s temerity
To dare.Adored with caution, as a brittle heaven,
To reach
Were hopeless as the rainbow’s raiment
To touch,Yet persevered toward, surer for the distance;
How high
Unto the saints’ slow diligence
The sky!Ungained, it may be, by a life’s low venture,
But then,
Eternity enables the endeavoring
Again.
— Emily Dickinson
photograph by Zac Ong via Unsplash
WHEN a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.
— Robert Frost
photograph by Maksym Kaharlytskyi via Unsplash
Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom. His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock and from this position his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy who was sitting frightened but graceful on the edge of a stiff chair.
— The Great Gatsby
photograph by Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
— Robert Frost
photograph by Tim Foster via Unsplash
Who will go drive with Fergus now,
And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade,
And dance upon the level shore?
Young man, lift up your russet brow,
And lift your tender eyelids, maid,
And brood on hopes and fear no more.And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love’s bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the brazen cars,
And rules the shadows of the wood,
And the white breast of the dim sea
And all dishevelled wandering stars.
— W. B. Yeats
photograph by Jordan Whitt via Unsplash
Of many reasons I love you here is one
the way you write me from the gate at the airport
so I can tell you everything will be alrightso you can tell me there is a bird
trapped in the terminal all the people
ignoring it because they do not know
what to do with it except to leave it alone
until it scares itself to deathit makes you terribly terribly sad
You wish you could take the bird outside
and set it free or (failing that)
call a bird-understander
to come help the birdAll you can do is notice the bird
and feel for the bird and write
to tell me how language feels
impossibly uselessbut you are wrong
You are a bird-understander
better than I could ever be
who make so many noises
and call them songThese are your own words
your way of noticing
and saying plainly
of not turning away
from hurtyou have offered them
to me I am only
giving them backif only I could show you
how very useless
they are not
— Craig Arnold
photograph by Ryan Byrne via Unsplash
NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come…
— Gerard Manley Hopkins
photograph by Yan Krukov via Pexels
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
— Langston Hughes
photograph by Inga Seliverstova via Pexels
THAT time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
— Sonnet LXXIII
And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line…
photograph by Andrea Piacquadio via Pexels
Think not, when the wailing winds of autumn
Drive the shivering leaflets from the tree,—
Think not all is over: spring returneth,
Buds and leaves and blossoms thou shalt see.Think not, when the earth lies cold and sealed,
And the weary birds above her mourn,—
Think not all is over: God still liveth,
Songs and sunshine shall again return.Think not, when thy heart is waste and dreary,
When thy cherished hopes lie chill and sere,—
Think not all is over: God still loveth,
He will wipe away thy every tear.Weeping for a night alone endureth,
God at last shall bring a morning hour;
In the frozen buds of every winter
Sleep the blossoms of a future flower.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe
photograph by Christian Lue via Unsplash
Outside the sun
has rolled up her rugsand night strewn salt
across the sky. My heartis humming a tune
I haven’t heard in years!
— Rita Dove (excerpt)
photograph by Shaan Johari via Pexels
His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look
On mists in idleness—to let fair things
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
— Keats, “The Human Seasons”
It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference
photograph by Emmeline T. via Unsplash
’Tis all that I implore;
In life and death a chainless soul
With courage to endure.
— Emily Bronte, “The Old Stoic”
photograph by Richard Jaimes via Unsplash
Fear not, Cesario. Take thy fortunes up.
— Twelfth Night
cf. The Glucksman Library, “Interior of Foundation Building” (edited digital collage)
Full souls are double mirrors, making still
An endless vista of fair things before,
Repeating things behind.
— Middlemarch, Epigraph to Chapter LXXII
photograph by Jackson Simmer via Unsplash
’Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall.
— Measure for Measure
photograph by Kindel Media via Pexels
My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.
— Sonnet L
photograph by National Cancer Institute via Unsplash
I would not creep along the coast but steer
Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.
— Middlemarch, Epigraph to Chapter XLIV
photograph by Kalle Saarinen via Unsplash
But when I came, alas, to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.
— Twelfth Night
photograph by Jason King via Unsplash
WHY, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky…
Or talk by day with any one I love…
— Whitman, Leaves of Grass (“Miracles”)
photograph by Liz Fitch via Unsplash
O, step between her and her fighting soul.
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.
Speak to her, Hamlet.
photograph by Edward Howell via Unsplash
“Oh, rescue her! I am her brother now,
And you her father. Every gentle maid
Should have a guardian in each gentleman.”
— Epigraph to Middlemarch, Chapter VIII
Image by Gerd Altmann via Pixabay
Again I feel the words inspire
Their mournful calm; serene,
Yet tinged with infinite desire
For all that might have been—
— Matthew Arnold, “Obermann Once More”
photograph by Mikita Yo via Unsplash
Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole:
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or Love in a golden bowl?
— William Blake, from “The Book of Thel”
photograph by Ron Lach via Pexels
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
— Sonnet CXVI
photograph by Zane Lindsay via Unsplash
SUCCESS is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory,As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Break, agonized and clear.
— Emily Dickinson
Frank T. Merrill, “Hercules frees Prometheus from the rock” (1904)
Meanwhile, during the first flush of success and before the release of “Fantastic,” we’d decided that Wham!’s creative reins should rest solely with George if we were to achieve the scale of success we believed was in our reach. I had long recognized his ability… The decision still smarted a little, but it was the right one: George was so clearly developing into a writer of rare ability; indeed it was the desire to realize the potential of that gift which drove him to become a solo artist, free of our band’s constraints…
— Andrew Ridgeley, “Wham!, George Michael and Me: A Memoir”
photograph by Oveth Martinez via Unsplash
From out the dragging vastness of the sea,
Wave-fettered, bound in sinuous seaweed strands,
He toils toward the rounding beach, and stands
One moment, white and dripping, silently,
Cut like a cameo in lazuli,
Then falls, betrayed by shifting shells, and lands
Prone in the jeering water, and his hands
Clutch for support where no support can be.
So up, and down, and forward, inch by inch,
He gains upon the shore, where poppies glow
And sandflies dance their little lives away.
The sucking waves retard, and tighter clinch
The weeds about him, but the land-winds blow,
And in the sky there blooms the sun of May.
— Amy Lowell
photograph by Johan Godínez via Unsplash
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
— Ada Limón
photograph by Jan Tinneberg via Unsplash
“GOING to him! Happy letter! Tell him—
Tell him the page I did n’t write;
Tell him I only said the syntax,
And left the verb and the pronoun out.
Tell him just how the fingers hurried,
Then how they waded, slow, slow, slow;
And then you wished you had eyes in your pages,
So you could see what moved them so.“Tell him it was n’t a practised writer,
You guessed, from the way the sentence toiled;
You could hear the bodice tug, behind you,
As if it held but the might of a child;
You almost pitied it, you, it worked so.
Tell him—No, you may quibble there,
For it would split his heart to know it,
And then you and I were silenter.“Tell him night finished before we finished,
And the old clock kept neighing ‘day!’
And you got sleepy and begged to be ended—
What could it hinder so, to say?
Tell him just how she sealed you, cautious,
But if he ask where you are hid
Until to-morrow,—happy letter!
Gesture, coquette, and shake your head!”
— Emily Dickinson
photograph by Cody Doherty via Unsplash
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
— Plath, The Bell Jar
photograph by Samantha Garrote via Pexels
“…when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
— First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln
photograph by Riccardo Mion via Unsplash
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
— Wallace Stevens
photograph by Ángel López via Unsplash
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
— Edna St. Vincent Millay
photograph by David Tran via Unsplash
Thou dusky spirit of the wood,
Bird of an ancient brood,
Flitting thy lonely way,
A meteor in the summer’s day,
From wood to wood, from hill to hill,
Low over forest, field and rill,
What wouldst thou say?
Why shouldst thou haunt the day?
What makes thy melancholy float?
What bravery inspires thy throat,
And bears thee up above the clouds,
Over desponding human crowds,
Which far below
Lay thy haunts low?
— Henry David Thoreau
photograph by Devin Avery via Unsplash
I hear a river thro’ the valley wander
Whose water runs, the song alone remaining.
A rainbow stands and summer passes under.
— Trumbull Stickney
photograph by Lisanto 李奕良 via Unsplash
All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire. Now, in the dark,
I feel only bitter sadness for us,
the builders, the planers of wood,
because I have been looking
steadily at these elms
and seen the process that creates
the writhing, stationary tree
is torment, and have understood
it will make no forms but twisted forms.
— Louise Glück
photograph by Darius Bashar via Unsplash
In Things of moment, on thy self depend…
— Benjamin Franklin
photograph by Taylor Grote via Unsplash
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall…
— Tennyson
photograph by Laurent Gence via Unsplash
“Wrong, Tony,” he said, and shook his head. “My courage does not go down to zero because I have a piece of bad luck. It’s the other way on. I believe in that, and events show it.”
— Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (Tr. Lowe-Porter)
photograph by Craig Whitehead via Unsplash
It’s brief and bright, dear children; bright and brief.
Delight’s the lightning; the long thunder’s grief.
— John Frederick Nims
photograph by Florencia Viadana via Unsplash
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
— Robert Frost
photograph by Samantha Hentosh via Unsplash
“…since you can’t sleep, and Mamma can’t either, we mustn’t go on in this stupid way; we must do something; I’ll get one of your books.” But I had none there. “Would you like me to get out the books now that your grandmother is going to give you for your birthday?”
— Proust, Swann’s Way
In The House Of Stone And Light
photograph by Christian Holzinger via Unsplash
a string of mercies
held to heart
intercessions
and counterpart
at evenfall
— J.S.
“Elvis” (2022)
lux aeterna
for one
lightning strike
for one
brief hallowed hour
fortune
and
fate
Heaven’s gate
hands
over
— J.S.
Paris, 1984 by John Sapiro
No donkey can cart
what weighs down your heart.
— Anonymous, East African Proverb (Tr. A. M. Juster)
photograph by National Cancer Institute via Unsplash
bridges burning
wilderness alone
and the night
like wavesforever onward
— J.S.
photograph by Khanh Tu Nguyen Huy via Unsplash
De consolatione philosophiae
I did the best that I could
— J.S.
Texas State University Flickr Commons, Unidentified Negatives (1963)
I CANNOT live with you,
It would be life,
And life is over there
Behind the shelfThe sexton keeps the key to,
Putting up
Our life, his porcelain,
Like a cup…So we must keep apart,
You there, I here,
With just the door ajar
That oceans are,
And prayer,
And that pale sustenance,
Despair!
— Emily Dickinson
photograph by Zachary Nelson via Unsplash
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means…
— Dylan Thomas
photograph by Oswald Elsaboath via Unsplash
instructions
no user serviceable parts
broken hearts
the fault, dear Brutus
is ever Descartes’
— J.S.
cf. photograph by Ana Markovych via Unsplash
I so liked Spring last year
Because you were here; –
The thrushes too –
Because it was these you so liked to hear –
I so liked you.This year’s a different thing, –
I’ll not think of you.
But I’ll like the Spring because it is simply Spring
As the thrushes do.
— Charlotte Mew
photograph by Nicate Lee via Unsplash
Schrödinger’s Reverie
she
is not here
and here
at the same
time
— J.S.
photograph by Free Old Photos via Unsplash
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
— William Ernest Henley
photograph by Rosie Kerr via Unsplash
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
— Gerard Manley Hopkins
John Sapiro 