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To the dragon any loss is total. His rest is disrupted if a single jewel encrusted goblet has been stolen. The circle of himself in the nest of his gold has been broken. No loss is token.
Copyright © 2014 by Kay Ryan. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on January 10, 2014. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman
It’s hard for
the master
sharpener after
all that work
to have the shaft
taken for the point.
People run themselves
Montaigne
You can oversell
the sea, say, or
the way we miss
the dead. The littlest
bit of absence excites
oceans. And of oceans
the less said the
better: the wet beyond
the land: we have a
Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time.
W.G. Sebald, A Place in the Country
There is a webby and
exalted state of
comprehension wherein
discrete events—like the
rigging lights of separate
boats upon a midnight
ocean—suggest a net: