[Untitled image — a collage — by artist Todd Hewitt, among several in his Flickr album called “Pareidolia.” (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) As he explains in several blog posts over the course of several months in 2010, for this series he paired snapshots with old magazine images which just happen to mimic, in part, each other’s shape/coloration. I think this is one of his more successful matchups.]

From whiskey river (second stanza):

Opus Posthumous III

Mid-August meltdown, Assurbanipal in the west,
Scorched cloud-towers, crumbling thrones—
The ancients knew to expect a balance at the end of things,
The burning heart against the burning feather of truth.
Sweet-mouthed,
Big ibis-eyed, in the maple’s hieroglyphs, I write it down.

All my life I’ve looked for this slow light, this smallish light
Starting to seep, coppery blue,
out of the upper right-hand corner of things,
Down through the trees and off the back yard,
Rising and falling at the same time, now rising, now falling,
Inside the lapis lazuli of late afternoon.

Until the clouds stop, and hush.
Until the left hedge and the right hedge,
the insects and short dogs,
The back porch and barn swallows grain-out and disappear.
Until the bypass is blown with silence, until the grass grieves.
Until there is nothing else.

(Charles Wright [source])

…and (italicized passage):

I love the common miracles—the murmur of my friends at evening, the clay fires of smudgy juniper, the coarse dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a time… gradually my mind has cleared itself, and wind and sun pour through my head, as through a bell. Though we talk little here, I am never lonely; I am returned into myself.

…In another life—this isn’t what I know, but how I feel—these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon—the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the supper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again to the sky.

(Peter Matthiesen [source])

…and:

Today we are all doing penance every day. We’re working hard, trying to make money to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table, trying to maintain a good relationship or marriage, trying to keep our children safe and happy and educated, trying to keep the world from blowing itself up. We don’t need any more penance. We need some joy, an ideal, encouragement, a philosophy worthy of us, a real community, neighbors to keep us from having to go it alone. We need our own religion: our sources of inspiration, hope, and healing.

(Thomas Moore [source])

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