Time is an illusion.

– Albert Einstein

Gone Forever

Lost, yesterday,
somewhere between sunrise and sunset,
two golden hours,
each set with sixty diamond minutes. 

No reward is offered for they are gone forever.

― Horace Mann

Ennui is the echo in us
of time tearing itself apart.

– Emile M. Cioran

 Music is the harmonious voice of creation;
an echo of the invisible world.

– Giuseppe Mazzini

Poetry is an echo,
asking a shadow to dance.

– Carl Sandburg

A Picture

A picture is a secret about a secret,
the more it tells you the less you know.

– Diane Arbus

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs.
When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. 

– Ansel Adams

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, 

and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

– Leonardo da Vinci

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words

and that which cannot remain silent.

– Victor Hugo

It's all in how you arrange the thing...
the careful balance of the design is the motion.

– Andrew Wyeth

The Lapse Of Time

…everything grows old under the power of Time
and is forgotten through the lapse of Time
 

― Aristotle

Although They Are

Although they are
only breath, words
which I command
are immortal

– Sappho

 

Dawn

Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings--
beating color up into it
at a far edge,--beating it, beating it
with rising, triumphant ardor,--
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,--
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself--is lifted--
bit by bit above the edge
of things,--runs free at last
out into the open--!lumbering
glorified in full release upward--
songs cease.

– William Carlos Williams

The Logic Of Spring

In another poem, called The Logic of Spring,

        a mechanical drawing of a tree

that I've passed a 100 times

         on my way to a different problem.

I glance backwards, and the stack of the day

multiplies, glancing backwards several times,

the dog-eared corner with the graph paper sky of that morning

        and the logic of spring.

Right before I wake, I hear the riposte of mean jays (blue dots

        that drag the pink banners of answers off the tree

with words in gold italic latin)

        from the fog pumped in by the machine

set on my lawn. First thing in the morning,

(page numbers in all the dish rags hanging around the sink)

         I part the buttery curtains

to see beyond the doric columns sitting on my porch & the

         hibiscus twig

that someone has set the stump of such a tree—gray

         smudges and still intact line breaks

with flashing pink splashes—

outside my house while I slept.

Seems unbearably cruel until

I realize that in the flapping fog I finally hear its questions.

Are you so easily distracted

         by pieces of a poem

attached to a tree?

         in which as the situation changes

you catch glimpses of yourself

         a series of emoticons.

– Alexandria Peary 

Praise Song For The Day

Each day we go about our business,

walking past each other, catching each other’s

eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is

noise and bramble, thorn and din, each

one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning

a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,

repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,

with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,

with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky.

A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words

spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,

words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark

the will of some one and then others, who said

I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.

We need to find a place where we are safe.

We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.

Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,

who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built

brick by brick the glittering edifices

they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.

Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,

the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,

others by first do no harm or take no more

than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,

love that casts a widening pool of light,

love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,

any thing can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

 

– Elizabeth Alexander

 

 

Now This

 

Thus the palm is rakish

and the philodendron
lugubrious.

Only using such rare words
will justify

my writing this,

my writing ‘my"
or now

here

– Rae Armantrout 

Stone's Secret

 Otter-smooth boulder
lies under rolling
black river-water
stilled among frozen
hills and the still unbreathed
blizzards aloft;
silently, icily, is probed
stone's secret.

Out there—past trace
of eyes, past these
and those memorial skies
dotting back signals from
men's made mathematics (we
delineators of curves and time who are
                                      subject to these)—
out there, inaccessible
to grammar's language the
stones curve vastnesses,
cold or candescent
in the perceived
processional of space.

                                  The stones out there in the
                                  violet-black are part of a
                                  slow-motion fountain? or of a
                                  fireworks pin-wheel?
                                  i.e. breathed in and out as in
                                  cosmic lungs? or
                                  one-way as an eye looking?

What mathematicians must,
also the pert,
they will
as the dark river runs.

Word has arrived that
peace will brim up, will come
"like a river and the
glory...like a flowing stream."
So.
Some of all people will
wondering wait
until this very stone
utters.

– Margaret Avison

Praying

It doesn’t have to be

the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

― Mary Oliver

Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth
– whether it existed before or not.

― John Keats