Rustles Hid Themselves in Shadows...

In a blinded window

suddenly

the tunnel of dawn along the staircase

appeared in all its definition

like footsteps hastening through sunny leaves

and everything fell suspended and silent.

Rustles hid themselves,

the birds swallowed their voices,

the sun motionlessly spread its rays

and sunbeams rustled in the eyes.

As in this fallen silent world

...

~ Text: Excerpt from a poem written by an anonymous Russian poet in an asylum in the 1970s

~ Images: Andrei Tarkovsky, stills from The Mirror

The Silence Makes Majesty...

Vilhelm Hammershøi: The Poetry of Silence, 2008

His work is long and slow

~ Rilke on Hammershoi

Vast and Silvery-White...

I ran barefoot to the window. The sky was swept lengthwise by gusts of wind. Vast and silvery-white, it was cut into lines of energy tensed to breaking point, into awesome furrows like strata of tin and lead. Divided into magnetic fields and trembling with discharges, it was full of concealed electricity. The diagrams of the gale were traced on it which, itself unseen and elusive, loaded the landscape with its power.

...

~ Text: Bruno Schulz, "The Gale" Street of Crocodiles

~ Image: Untitled, Tarrl Lightowler, 2008

Upon Silent Bridges, and Dreaming....

A Dream of Snow-Covered Bridges

As we stand the snow falls thicker.

Your sleeve turns white.

My sleeve turns white.

They move between us like

snow-covered bridges.

But snow-covered bridges are frozen.

In here is living warmth.

Your arm is warm beneath the snow, and

a welcome weight on mine.

It snows and snows

upon silent bridges.

Bridges unknown to all.

...

~ Text: Chapter 12 in The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas

~ Image: Isle of Staffa, Inner Hebrides, Scotland, Thomas Joshua Cooper, from the beautiful Dreaming the Gokstadt

Transparency, or the Elsewhere of Here...

Thresholds appear often in her work – as do walls, windows, doors, gardens, paths, colors (especially gold), and ‘transparency.’ ‘At the heart of the stone,’ she writes, ‘reposes transparency.’ […] An image involves holding one’s breath and being ‘without thickness,’ so as to squeeze into a sort of initiatory passageway. ‘In in-betweenness,’ she explains, ‘the world is real.’

~ Text from “Dwell in Slowness, Explore the Elsewhere of Here,” an essay on the poet Heather Dohollau

…

And a bird goes from here

To the invisible

Without breaking the thread

Of time’s trembling

A Prayer for things

Traversing transparent hands

With edge intact

And a curve so perfect

That the body hollows into breath

~ Poem fragments from Dohollau's "A Grave for W.B." and “Hercules Seghers”

~ Images from the Robert N. Dennis Collection of stereoscopic views at NYPL