Sight is a Museum of things Seen²
I, who stand Intent upon Beholding, See³
Every Picture has its Shadows and it has some
Source of Light: Blindness, Blindness and Sight⁴
An Everlasting Vision of the Everchanging View⁵
We Blink off Old Eyelids for New Ways of Seeing⁶
One Shape after another of Unimaginable Beauty
Signals an intention to provide, for nothing, for
Looking Merely – with Beauty, more Beauty⁷
A Wonderful View arranges itself, wherever
You Walk or Sit – into a Perfect Balance⁸
A Recognition: the Known appears Fully
Itself – and more Itself than one Knew⁹
Perception of an Object Costs
Precise the Object’s Loss¹⁰
¹ Christina Pugh, The Staircase
² Wallace Stevens, Examination of the Hero in a Time of War
³ Dante Alighieri tr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Inferno
⁴ Joni Mitchell, Shadows and Light
⁵ Carol King, Tapestry
⁶ Harryette Mullen, Shedding Skin
⁷ Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
⁸ Ursula K. Le Guin, Old Music and the Slave Women
⁹ Denise Levertov, Matins
¹⁰ Emily Dickinson, Perception of an Object