a shandean commonplace book

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing A flowery band to bind us to the earth, Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, Of all the unhealthy and o'erdarkened ways Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all, Some shape of beauty moves away the pall From our dark spirits. -John Keats

My wife is not afraid of dark. She uses lights like handholds, climbing down caverns she accepts as found. She is as comfortable as blossoms when the sun goes down. Forests we've camped in at night are forests, to her, clear-eyed, seeing no visions she can't blink away. In sudden dark, she goes on mending clothes by feel while I sweat and rage to make the spare fuse fit. When she was six a fat man digging a storm cellar shut her and a friend inside, stood on the black steel door and stomped like thunder. Frozen, too frightened to reach for Becky screaming in her ears, she felt nothing could ever be that dark again. In time the door clanged open and light baptized her with perhaps too deep a trust in saviors. She lies down now in darkness with no human hand but mine to cling to, nothing but faith in the moment to let her sleep.  When storms short out the relay stations, she knows how to touch me, how to make romance of failure, knows like

.  .  . consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?  For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. Herman Melville

The Previous Tenants 1 The couple who built our house had great plans for this lot where they would live out their days: he in dedicated husbandry, priming a garden with sludge from the sewage plant, hauling stones from the condemned homesteads by the new lake to buttress the terraces; and she reading Aquinas or pouring Pinot noir for predinner conversations after her work as a counselor at the women’s center. She had returned to shcool late, a fourth degree, and a meaningful career after years of jobs for little pay or credit, the fate of a faculty wife. She had a gift for empathy, a true calling, said a fellow counselor at her memorial. And then the younger son stood and agreed that, yes, she was a fine counselor, but a terrible mother. “She was not there fore us when we failed. She only loved our successes.” Cicadas, then October’s first cold night, the instant stuck there like an arrow singing in a wall. 2 Until then we had foolishly thought them happy: he