Intersections

For what it is

A kit of pigeons swirl

through the dense knotted limbs
of benumbed frost-bitten trees
black and bare to my blind eye

I see a dozen flapping wings 

 that thrust against the clasp of winter,

hear crisp-clear whips of sails at sea

midst fierce gusts of arctic wind —
emphatic flight for higher ground;
a silver cloud moored on the roof,
a reverie perhaps, immersed?
.

for what it is, is that, which isn't
and what is sought is seldom seen
or grasped in the moment,
but missed, and missed

(composite after J.M.W. Turner)

odd distance

"You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance 
between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier 
thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; 
you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, 
where everything is upside down and backward and sad."

― Marya Hornbacher

Mindfully blind

"What does a mirror look at?"
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

Oriental obscurity

A year a month a new day in the making

"Let us note well that all the contradictions in which we exist ― 
the misfortune of a thought that has nothing with which to begin 

and dissipates from one infinite to the other; 
the ambiguity by which we are scattered, not dwelling, 
incessantly coming and going, always here and there 

and yet nowhere, curious with regard to everything 

in order not to stop anywhere; 
a world in which nothing is either present or absent, 
where there is neither proximity not distance,

where everything escapes, leaving us the illusion of having everything ― 
all this is the consequence of a dispersing, pervasive, and errant obscurity 

that we have not had the force to fix in place."

― Maurice Blanchot