on/off

         "Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind." 
 - Derek Walcott - 





Marcel Rieder







Minerva Chapman 








Stefan Johansson 



         "Either all lights are turned off or one inner light is missing."  
 - Dejan Sojanovic -  



Niels Holsoe 






 George Clausen




Christian Krohg




John Henry Lorimer 


        When you flip the switch in that attic, it doesen' matter 
      whether its been dark for ten minutes, ten years, or ten decades. 

      The light still illuminates the room and banishes the murkiness, 
       letting you see the things you couldn't see before. 

       It's never too late to take a moment to look. 
 - Sharon Salzberg -  

 "Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be 
  proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast 
  and one pricks up one's ears and listens, say in the night, when 
  everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling 
  of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall. 
 - Franz Kafka -  

Victor Pivovarov  

 Moral vision whose intense, meandering design 
 Seems lightened by a pure simplicity of feeling, 
 As in grief, or in the pathos of life 
 Cut off by loneliness, indifference or hate, 
 Because the most important thing is human happiness - 
 Not in the sense of private satisfaction, but of 
 Lives that realize themselves in ordinary terms 
 And with quiet inconsistencies that make them real. 
 - John Koethe -  

Lionel Bulmer 

/

Mary Oliver

Bone

1.

Understand, I am always trying to figure out

what the soul is,

and where hidden,

and what shape 

and so, last week,

when I found on the beach

the ear bone

of a pilot whale that may have died

hundreds of years ago, I thought

maybe I was close

to discovering something 

for the ear bone

2.

is the portion that lasts longest

in any of us, man or whale; shaped

like a squat spoon

with a pink scoop where

once, in the lively swimmer's head,

it joined its two sisters

in the house of hearing,

it was only

two inches long 

and thought: the soul

might be like this 

so hard, so necessary 

3.

yet almost nothing.

Beside me

the gray sea

was opening and shutting its wave-doors,

unfolding over and over

its time-ridiculing roar;

I looked but I couldn't see anything

through its dark-knit glare;

yet don't we all know, the golden sand

is there at the bottom,

though our eyes have never seen it,

nor can our hands ever catch it

4.

lest we would sift it down

into fractions, and facts 

certainties 

and what the soul is, also

I believe I will never quite know.

Though I play at the edges of knowing,

truly I know

our part is not knowing,

but looking, and touching, and loving,

which is the way I walked on,

softly,

through the pale-pink morning light.

from Why I Wake Early 

Cold may lie the day, And bare of grace; At night I slip away To the Singing Place.

Outside, leaves shaped like mouths

make a black pool

under a tree. Snails glide

there, little death-swans.

Robert Kipniss


 Darren Hopes


Maxime Sabourin 


'Hope in the Distance '




Zhao Bo




Marina Richterova 

Tanja Hirschfeld


...sleeping on a nest of bones...

... he sleeps

and dreams about a death that is coming:

Inside him, there are small bones

scattered in a field among burdocks and dead grass.

He will spend his life walking there,

gathering the bones together.

Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,

                           Nothing but bones,

      The sad effect of sadder groans:

Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.

 Christer Karlstad 

a voice inside the voice inside the

  box, tongue in cheek, box buried somewhere

                                                                                    east...

      It wasn’t singing we were there for, chant

  though we did sotto voce, an agonized aplomb of

    some sort

(...)

commemorative lament. Something

known as la-la crowded my throat, clung to

  the roof of my mouth. La-la meant I loved it,

                                                                                    torn

      but tucked away, the versionary company of

  love

To ask would be to awake,—

         To be denied.

(...)

And the pulsing chant swells up

         To touch the sky,

And the song is joy, is life,

         And the song am I! 

Martin Wittfooth 






Robert Kipniss

Antony Gormley, 'Snowfall'

But tonight the bones in my feet

begin to burn. I stand up

and start walking, and the slab

appears under my feet with each step,

a white road only as long as your body.

Franz Sedlacek


Alexander Tinei


Franz Sedlacek


Giovanni Segantini 


Rien Poortvliet 


“Ghost Line” 

I felt my own bones wrench from my body.

Now I am twenty-seven and walk

beside this river, looking for them.

They have become a bridge

that arches toward the other shore.

Tania Rutland, “Meeting of Ways” 


Yaroslav Gerzhedovich




title - Lily A. Long  
1,2,3,7 and 8. excerpts from a poem of Gregory Orr
4. excerpt from a poem of  George Herbert
5. from a poem by Nathaniel Mackey
6. - Lily A. Long