Feet Upon the Verge is a collection of Shirley Glubka’s late-life work: erasures, ekphrases, essays, and a gathering of quotations representing her explorations in the fields of philosophy, spirituality, and poetry.
SAMPLE ERASURES:
WHEREFORE DO I FEEL SUCH LOVE & PITY
O my sweet world! I urge sleep, peace,
in a wave bright with all the fibers,
molten, fluid, stretching out,
forming under the days & years, warping,
whirling in the deep Eternal Mind,
surging,
settled,
shining clear. (Source text: William Blake’s The Four Zoas)
ASK YOUR SHADOW
You dream, become ink--
at the mercy of elsewhere-syllables,
lightning-seized branches and leaves,
that unique moment you cannot say.
At a precise point, moving in the fog,
born with the making, fragile, open,
the alphabet is yours.
Chance is the reader, the light, the world, innocence.
(Source text: Edmond Jabés’s The Book of Questions)
FIXED IN TIME AND SPACE
To form a work of art,
chaos near, bewildering,
the whole field must be worked,
combining and combining,
preserving the dream,
ranging through mind and time.
More we cannot do. (Source text: Paul Klee’s On Modern Art)
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SAMPLE EKPHRASES:
FEET TODAY
—for Margaret, after 2 & 4 footers by stream by S. B. Sowbel
She walks the path of passion,
pure
clear red beneath her feet,
vibrant intensity,
and the faithful canines follow,
close to the ground,
their little feet friendly
on the same red way
over which they often
leap and speed,
but today they follow,
feeling the forwardness,
how the human goes on, on--
how she absorbs the Source
from the blue stream and the
green trees / in sunlight.
CENTER BACK, PLACE ON FOLD
—after Queen of Eyes by F. Zarod Rominski
…the infinite fold separates or moves between matter and soul,
the façade and the closed room, the outside and the inside.
—Gilles Deleuze
She remembers tissue paper patterns,
weeks of sewing earnestly,
simple garments she once wore.
No one called her Queen then.
No one knew.
She is only outline now, more transparent than
those tissue paper patterns
and more real.
It took a lifetime to become this floating ghost,
a queenly freer being whose many eyes are freer too,
eyes swimming in the colored swirl
where liberated numbers and a multitude of memories
appear and disappear and the accoutrements of queenship
are kept on colored cards, turning in the currents like all else.
She needs no crown, no throne, no game of chance.
All striving toward a royal visibility is past, all need to be
beyond the outline of herself. Queen of the receding,
a woman emptied of all personal perspective,
floating in the whirl of what her freed eyes see, she is
ghost queen of what floats in, floats out, floats everywhere.
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FEET TODAY
—for Margaret, after 2 & 4 footers by stream by S. B. Sowbel
She walks the path of passion,
pure
clear red beneath her feet,
vibrant intensity,
and the faithful canines follow,
close to the ground,
their little feet friendly
on the same red way
over which they often
leap and speed,
but today they follow,
feeling the forwardness,
how the human goes on, on--
how she absorbs the Source
from the blue stream and the
green trees / in sunlight.
CENTER BACK, PLACE ON FOLD
—after Queen of Eyes by F. Zarod Rominski
…the infinite fold separates or moves between matter and soul,
the façade and the closed room, the outside and the inside.
—Gilles Deleuze
She remembers tissue paper patterns,
weeks of sewing earnestly,
simple garments she once wore.
No one called her Queen then.
No one knew.
She is only outline now, more transparent than
those tissue paper patterns
and more real.
It took a lifetime to become this floating ghost,
a queenly freer being whose many eyes are freer too,
eyes swimming in the colored swirl
where liberated numbers and a multitude of memories
appear and disappear and the accoutrements of queenship
are kept on colored cards, turning in the currents like all else.
She needs no crown, no throne, no game of chance.
All striving toward a royal visibility is past, all need to be
beyond the outline of herself. Queen of the receding,
a woman emptied of all personal perspective,
floating in the whirl of what her freed eyes see, she is
ghost queen of what floats in, floats out, floats everywhere.
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SAMPLE FROM "CONVERGENCE" SECTION:
THE SHINING POINT
In Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, Czeslaw Milosz wrote: “Nothing could stifle my inner certainty that a shining point exists where all lines intersect.” I have loved this quote for decades, this practiced poet’s image with its clarity and mystery, this complex thinker’s sturdy certainty.
In my own search for self-definition, and for a native realm, three lines have met: spirituality, philosophy, and poetry. The point at which they meet and cross and continue on their respective ways is, yes, shining.
But what can I say about a shining point where all lines intersect? I seem to know something about such a point, and yet to know nothing at all. At this moment, feet upon the verge, that wavering paradox feels like enough, and a great gift.
I should add that I’ve wondered whether the two shining points, Milosz’s and mine, share a bit of DNA, if not as siblings, then at least as cousins.
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THE SHINING POINT
In Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, Czeslaw Milosz wrote: “Nothing could stifle my inner certainty that a shining point exists where all lines intersect.” I have loved this quote for decades, this practiced poet’s image with its clarity and mystery, this complex thinker’s sturdy certainty.
In my own search for self-definition, and for a native realm, three lines have met: spirituality, philosophy, and poetry. The point at which they meet and cross and continue on their respective ways is, yes, shining.
But what can I say about a shining point where all lines intersect? I seem to know something about such a point, and yet to know nothing at all. At this moment, feet upon the verge, that wavering paradox feels like enough, and a great gift.
I should add that I’ve wondered whether the two shining points, Milosz’s and mine, share a bit of DNA, if not as siblings, then at least as cousins.
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SAMPLE FROM "WOVEN QUOTATIONS" SECTION:
poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent
—Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.
—Czeslaw Milosz, “Ars Poetrica?”
How else can one write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other.
—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
some latency in things leading not so much to speech
as to a halting, haunted art
wherein to master was to miss—
how to say this, how to say this
—Christian Wiman, “Every Riven Thing, Late Fragment”
again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
It is the being of things, it is their shape. Beautiful brook, how touching you seem, rolling so clearly, like the eye of God, through the Milky Way.
—Friedrich Hölderlin, “In a lovely blue”
Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
Nor is it good to be too wise.
—Friedrich Hölderlin, “The calling of poetry”’
Do not bring into the domain of reasoning that which belongs to our innermost feeling.
—Joseph Joubert, as quoted by Matthew Arnold in Essays in Criticism
Bring something incomprehensible into the world!
—Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
The philosopher is a mystic when he passes beyond thought to the pure apprehension of truth.
—Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism
That glimmer of the facet
Of a whole so immense
It can never be contained
Or limited by any
One
—Pauline Duchesneau, “Facet”
to sing outside of time,
to dream outside of sleep,
to let the spirit know at last the truth:
there is no difference between the body and the breeze
—Sonia Gernes, “Margaret 1916: The Fremantle Residence for Poor Ladies”
I am the floor on which this object sits,
the painted wall against which it leans.
I am the air that surrounds it,
as I am the soft-falling light of the sun.
—Laura Levenson, “One Possible Explanation for Just About Everything”
The way the earliest single light in the evening sky, in spring,
Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself
The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected magnitudes.
—Wallace Stevens, “Prologue to What Is Possible”
I’m sketching these torn leaves of wild rhubarb
in the gravel beneath the old stone wall,
capturing in Pre-Raphaelite detail
their exquisite miracles of ribbing,
chlorophyll, how they capture unheard-of
frequencies, give substance to time-travelled light.
—Rosie Jackson, “Of Angels and Dirt”
And from the stillness of the down-crushed walls
One pillar rose up dark against the moon.
There was a nameless Presence everywhere.
—Edwin Markham, “In Death Valley”
I paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, intensest blue.
—Vincent Van Gogh, as quoted in Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?
poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent
—Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.
—Czeslaw Milosz, “Ars Poetrica?”
How else can one write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other.
—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
some latency in things leading not so much to speech
as to a halting, haunted art
wherein to master was to miss—
how to say this, how to say this
—Christian Wiman, “Every Riven Thing, Late Fragment”
again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.
—Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
It is the being of things, it is their shape. Beautiful brook, how touching you seem, rolling so clearly, like the eye of God, through the Milky Way.
—Friedrich Hölderlin, “In a lovely blue”
Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
Nor is it good to be too wise.
—Friedrich Hölderlin, “The calling of poetry”’
Do not bring into the domain of reasoning that which belongs to our innermost feeling.
—Joseph Joubert, as quoted by Matthew Arnold in Essays in Criticism
Bring something incomprehensible into the world!
—Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
The philosopher is a mystic when he passes beyond thought to the pure apprehension of truth.
—Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism
That glimmer of the facet
Of a whole so immense
It can never be contained
Or limited by any
One
—Pauline Duchesneau, “Facet”
to sing outside of time,
to dream outside of sleep,
to let the spirit know at last the truth:
there is no difference between the body and the breeze
—Sonia Gernes, “Margaret 1916: The Fremantle Residence for Poor Ladies”
I am the floor on which this object sits,
the painted wall against which it leans.
I am the air that surrounds it,
as I am the soft-falling light of the sun.
—Laura Levenson, “One Possible Explanation for Just About Everything”
The way the earliest single light in the evening sky, in spring,
Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself
The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected magnitudes.
—Wallace Stevens, “Prologue to What Is Possible”
I’m sketching these torn leaves of wild rhubarb
in the gravel beneath the old stone wall,
capturing in Pre-Raphaelite detail
their exquisite miracles of ribbing,
chlorophyll, how they capture unheard-of
frequencies, give substance to time-travelled light.
—Rosie Jackson, “Of Angels and Dirt”
And from the stillness of the down-crushed walls
One pillar rose up dark against the moon.
There was a nameless Presence everywhere.
—Edwin Markham, “In Death Valley”
I paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, intensest blue.
—Vincent Van Gogh, as quoted in Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?
