a shandean commonplace book

We have been telling the story wrong all along, how a king took Philomela's tongue after he had taken her body, and how the gods turned her into a nightingale so she could tell the night of her grief. Even now the streets wait for her lamentation—strays minister to bones abandoned on a stoop, a man sleeps on the ghosts of yesterday's heat, pigeons rest on top of the church and will not stir until they hear music below them. Inside, a woman warms up the organ and sings Via Dolorosa about a Messiah who wanted to save everyone from the wages of pleasure. But how can I keep a man's fingers from my mouth? How can I resist bare trees dervishing on the sidewalk? A woman outside the train station asks, Is there a city underneath this city? I say, Let me tell you a story, and tell her that after Longfellow put out the fire in his wife's dress, after he buried her, after his burns turned to soft pink skin, he translated the Inferno. There is a place deep in the earth for the ravi...

Years before ever seeing California, I wrote a story titled “Oakland in Rain.” Rain served as an easy metaphor for the unexpected in a place known for abundance, and it provided a texture of melancholy. The nameless protagonist—an exiled drunk who was, of course, a thinly veiled version of myself— had lost her mind and believed the weather communicated with her: rain meant soberness, that she had been absolved of some sort of punishment. Plagued by her wild inner life, I imagined her wandering the city, intent on getting lost in the Catholic cemeteries, where she took note   of lemons in the wet grass (an offering?), the sky, a hawk on a tree. But no matter where she went, nothing was ever quiet enough. Despite my best efforts, the narrative was bleak; it lacked tension and a convincing resolution. Now, why am I telling you all this? Well, one day I woke up and it had been raining in the Oakland of my actual life. Outside my window, the cottonwood trees looked like the day before, ...

I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbors with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. George Eliot, Silas Marner

Back then I was going steady with fog, who could dance like no one’s business, I threw her over for a leaf that one day fluttered first her shadow then her whole life into my hand, that’s a lot of responsibility and a lot of relatives, this leaf and that leaf and all the other leaves hung around, I told her I needed space, which was true, without it I’d only be a soul, and no one’s sure that wisp is real, that’s why we say of real estate, location, location, location, and of speech, locution, locution, locution, and of love, yes, yes, yes, I am on my knees, will you have me, world? Bob Hicok

         After Ken Workman When someone asks me for my papers, I think of land acknowledgements. Ken says, You know him as Chief Seattle. I know him as grandpa. It’s important that when you’re here, on this land, you know where you are. A man named Lee invented the Southern strategy; now it’s gone digital. Ready or not. Don’t make people perform their pain. My name tells you my father’s name, his father’s, his, and so on. Yet no heads nod. Aphorizing again, the keynote says solidarity is a verb—a nation solidarities its aim solid. The game: geographic realignment. Miami-Dade. Dekalb. King. We could win where we play the hardest. Center base. Power forward. Running back. I’ve never lived in the South, yet I know generous people. We live in Puyallup, the woman in the video says, Everyone got messed up bumpers but the cop pulled me over. You know why. All of this is just an excuse to do the right thing. You know what kind of person needs an excuse to...

And then the gray concrete of the subway platform, that shore     stripped of all premise of softness or repose. I stood there, beneath the city's sequential grids     and frameworks, its wrappings and unwrappings like a robe sewn with birds that flew into seasons of light,     a robe of gold and then a robe of ash. All around me were briefcases, cell phones, baseball caps,     folded umbrellas forlorn and still glistening with rain. Who owned them? Each face possessed a hiddenness.     DO NOT STEP ACROSS THE YELLOW LINE; the Transit Authority had painted this onto the platform's edge     beyond which the rails gleamed, treacherous, almost maniacal,     yet somehow full of promise. Glittery, icy, undead. Sharp as acid eating through a mask. I counted forward     in my mind to the third rail, bristling with current, hissing inside it like a promise or a wish; and the wo...