a shandean commonplace book

In the first verse I find his skeleton  nested in shore grass, late one autumn day. The loss of life and the life which is decay  have been so gentle, so clasped one-to-one  that what they left is perfect; and here in  the second verse I kneel to pick it up: bones like the fine white china of a cup,  chambered for lightness, dangerously thin, their one clear purpose forcing them toward flight even now, from the warm solace of my hand.  In the third verse I bend to that demand  and -- quickly, against the deepening of night,  because I can in poems -- remake his wild eye,  his claws, and the tense heat his muscles keep,  his wings' knit feathers, then free him to his steep  climb, in the last verse, up the streaming sky.  Jonathan Revere

Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.  Pascal

We are not in the same place after all. The only evidence of the disaster, Mapping out across the bedroom wall, Tiny cracks still fissuring the plaster -- A new cartography for us to master, In whose legend we read where we are bound: Terra infirma, a stranger land, and vaster. Or have we always stood on shaky ground? The moment keeps on happening: a sound. The floor beneath us swings, a pendulum That clocks the heart, the heart so tightly wound, We fall mute, as when two lovers come To the brink of the apology, and halt, Each standing on the wrong side of the fault. A. E. Stallings

It is through art and art only that we can realize our perfection: through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence. Oscar Wilde

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.  Whatever I see I swallow immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful-- The eye of a little god, four-cornered.  Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.  It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long  I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.  Faces and darkness separate us over and over.  Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,  Searching my reaches for what she really is.  Then she turns back to those liars, the candles or the moon.  I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.  She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.  I am important to her. She comes and goes.  Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.  In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.  Sylvia Plath

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. George Santayana

Lie back, daughter, let your head  be tipped back in the cup of my hand.  Gently, and I will hold you. Spread  your arms wide, lie out on the stream and look high at the gulls. A dead- man's-float is face down. You will dive and swim soon enough where this tidewater ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe me, when you tire in the long thrash to your island, lie up, and survive. As you float now, where I held you and let go, remember when fear  cramps your heart what I told you: lie gently and wide to the light-year stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.  Philip Booth

Surely the first step is to understand in one way or another. Erasmus

The praisers of women in their proud and beautiful poems Naming the grave mouth and the hair and the eyes Boasted those they loved should be forever remembered These were lies The words sound but the face in the Istrian sun is forgotten The poet speaks but to her dead ears no more The sleek through is gone — and the breast that was troubled to listen Shadow from door Therefore I will not praise your knees nore your fine walking Telling you men shall remember your anme as long As lips move or breath is spent or the iron of English Rings from a tongue I shall say you were young and your arms straight and your mouth scarlet I shall say you will die and none will remember you Your arms change and none remember the swish of your garments Nor the click of your shoe Not with my hand’s strength not with difficult labor Springing the obstinate words to the bones of your breast And the stubborn line to your young stride and the breath to your breathin...

Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter, So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly  Singing about her head, as she rode by. Robert Graves

What insensate folly to spend in hating and hurting our fellow-men the few days we spend among them! Petrarch

Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on,  testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade,  and think of that first flawless moment over the lawn of the labyrinth. Think of the difference it made! There below are the trees, as awkward as camels; and here are the shocked starlings pumping past  and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite  well: larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast of the plushy ocean, he goes. Admire his wings! Feel the fire at his neck and see how casually he glances up and is caught, wondrously tunneling into that hot eye. Who cares that he fell back to the sea? See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down while his sensible daddy goes straight into town. Anne Sexton

The striving for wisdom is the second paradise of the world. Paracelsus

Something has pried open the body of this hare, unpicked a seam from between the stilled hindlegs to the middle of the slackened, gray belly. Now the two sides of the wound part slowly, like a mouth widening as it comes on the right word, or that neat tear in the half-obscured lower thigh at the center of the theater in Eakins's The Gross Clinic where, as I remember it, the owl-eyed surgeon seems so unmoved by the thick, scarlet globules that glisten like cheap lipstick on his thumb and the anguish a mother buries in her dress sleeve as he explains precisely how he will poke a scalpel into tendon, muscle, bone, to remove the latest clot of gangrene from the left leg of her son who might, if all goes well, last out the year. Two assistants hold the patient down, while a third and fourth, with their crude tools, keep open the incision and stare deep into the mysteries of the flesh, as eager for their time with the body as the petrels, kittiwakes, black-headed gulls, that tend the har...

Inasmuch as love grows in you, so in you beauty grows.  For love is the beauty of the soul. Augustine

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years -- Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate — but there is no competition — There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. ...

Turbulent events over, the tropical island a gruesome memory, I am a private citizen again with a sufficient if ungenerous pension provided by our good Uncle, and, while awaiting the sequence of surgeries expected in my age group, just like all the other oldies in the supermarket pushing their shopping carts— or maybe luckier, since unlike many of them, angry-faced and aggressive with their carts in the aisles, I’m not alone. I hardly can remember when, all those years, I had a public responsibility— for what, to save the world? Stimulate unawakened minds? Straighten out erroneous ideas? I no longer imagine I could! But I had healing magic in my fingertips then, and the voices of the gods encouraged me. I even dreamed that Shakespeare created me, the Magician. And when the words that came from him appeared on the page, I was Shakespeare! Only when I go on stage to do my old act, —with the hall three-quarters empty, as it usually is now— do I remember h...

If you write a poem about love . . . the love is a bird, the poem is an origami bird. If you write a poem about death . . . the death is a terrible fire, the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames you feed to the fire. We can see, in these, the space between our gestures and the power they address —an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty, a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm from out of nowhere hit New York one night in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught unloading props: a box of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped and broken open, and that flash of white confetti was lost inside what it was a praise of. Albert Goldbarth

To know the abyss of the darkness and not to fear it, to entrust oneself to it and whatever may arise from it -- what greater gift? Ursula K. LeGuin

Not to forget that we had wooden guns once just as the Germans did when they invaded the Ruhr in 1936 and likewise we abandoned wallpaper for paint and there was an army of 500,000 monkeys who carried wooden rifles over their heads when they crossed the Delaware and how the Hessians applauded and how George Washington ordered grog for everyone there and since it was a Christian holiday they built the largest fire in New Jersey history and even burned their beautiful boat whose curves anticipated the helical waves and whose bottom unfolded, as it were, or shot through water something like a bottle or just skimmed the surface like a stone and everyone sitting stood up, not only Washington, and shouted just above Trenton almost the shortest night of the year and we spoke Deutsche and everyone hugged the person to his right although the left was not out of the question and we said, "Peace," we always say it, the way they said it in the Rhine, the way they said it on the Danube, a...

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us, for it is a point of view about things. Marcel Proust

She’s the trunk and they’re the blowing branches: the seagulls mass around her as she scatters bread crusts grapped from a plastic grocery bag. They dip to her, since bread is all that matters. She cases the crumbs in lamplight, over water, to gulls who catch her manna on the wing — snatching their staple needs straight from the air, the sky replete with every wanted thing, until it seems that they might live off giving. Back in the bag, her right hand burrows in and finds a further hunk of loaf and chucks it into the glinting sleet. The cries begin, and, without fail, bread finds another mouth. After she goes, the dark birds settle back. They float south with the floes along the bank, their fortune pitched in wind, the water black. David Yezzi

I am a poet. I am very fond of bananas. I am bananas. I am very fond of a poet. I am a poet of bananas. I am very fond. A fond poet of 'I am, I am' -- Very bananas. Fond of 'Am I bananas? Am I?' -- a very poet. Bananas of a poet! Am I fond? Am I very? Poet bananas! I am. I am fond of a 'very'. I am of very fond bananas. Am I a poet? Wendy Cope

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? Vincent Van Gogh

This should have been the question to Jesus, not why, all that philosophy, but how, a little scientific curiosity. Maybe it became a disciple joke. The answer? With a pick and shovel? They'd giggle to themselves as they straggled behind him. Or maybe the beginning of the knock knock joke, most Biblical humor being morbid, Martha saying of poor Lazarus, "But, my Lord, by now he stinketh," and breaking everyone up. But nobody asked, or wrote it down. What difference could it make then, so near eternal life? But in those Dead Sea caves was neither handbook nor The Disciples' Big Book O' Jokes, which is a tragedy. Think about the savings! Or the quiet, kissless wakes because no one has lips. Or tears. Or casket wood to choose. And what else have they got to do? Bone idle, the British say. And that was the way he said it, "Let the dead bury the dead," as if they'd been waiting to, the real unemployed. Perhaps it's a potion you pour, a dust sprinkled o...

Every start upon an untrodden path is a venture which only in unusual circumstances looks sensible and likely to be successful. Albert Schweitzer

It is foolish to tear one's hair in grief as though sorrow would be made less in baldness. Cicero

From Dove cottage, I sloped out through the side gate and climbed the corpse road past the coffin stone, then curved through a mixed copse to a scree path scored by rainwater into the hill's back. I was hauled upward by a borrowed dog on a makeshift leash, a yellow Labrador, busy for every birdcall and blown leaf. Over a hand-stacked wall, in the next fold, under the driftwood bones of an old elm, a red deer had dropped down from the high fell with morning beaconed in its flaming horns. With dawn-light cradled in its branching crown. I stood in some blind spot of its dark eye, and deer and dog were still and unaware and stayed that way, divided by the wall, wild stag and hunting hound in separate worlds, before the deer pushed on through tinder thickets, igniting the next wold. And the dog yawned. Then I hacked up the ghyll to higher ground, toward the hill's bare head, counting the dead and the hikers striding along the ridge, thinking of taking a drink from the tarn, thinking...

It was like this: you were happy, then you were sad, then happy again, then not. It went on. You were innocent or you were guilty. Actions were taken, or not. At times you spoke, at other times you were silent. Mostly, it seems you were silent—what could you say? Now it is almost over. Like a love, your life bends down and kisses your life. It does this not in forgiveness— between you, there is nothing to forgive— but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment he sees the bread is finished with transformation. Eating, too, is now a thing only for others. It doesn't matter what they will make of you or your days: they will be wrong, they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man, all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention. Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad, you slept, you awakened. Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons. Jane Hirschfield

Somewhere in the world there is defeat for everyone.  Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory.  Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory. John Steinbeck

In all those stories the hero is beyond himself into the next thing, be it those labors of Hercules, or Aeneas going into death. I thought the instance of the one humanness in Virgil's plan of it was that it was of course human enough to die, yet to come back, as he said, hoc opus, hic labor est. That was the Cumaean Sibyl speaking. This is Robert Creeley, and Virgil is dead now two thousand years, yet Hercules and the Aeneid, yet all the industrious wis- dom lives in the way the mountains and the desert are waiting for the heroes, and death also can still propose the old labors. Robert Creeley

Truth has at once a compulsive and healing power.  We should not be afraid of truth for if recognized and acted upon it is the rock upon which we can base our individual and collective lives.  Paul Douglas

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky. ...

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, Every poem an epitaph.  And any action Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start. T. S. Eliot

The glass does not break because it is glass, Said the philosopher. The glass could stay Unbroken forever, shoved back in a dark closet, Slowly weeping itself, a colorless liquid. The glass breaks because somebody drops it From a height — a grip stunned open by bad news Or laughter. A giddy sweep of grand gesture Or fluttering nerves might knock it off the table — Or perhaps wine emptied from it, into the blood, Has numbed the fingers. It breaks because it falls Into the arms of the earth — that grave attraction. It breaks because it meets the floor's surface, Which is solid and does not give. It breaks because It is dropped, and falls hard, because it hits Bottom, and because nobody catches it. A. E. Stallings

The future is not a choice between alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created — created first in mind and will, created next in activity.  The future is not some place we are going to but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination. John Schaar

This happens in Schubert And elsewhere, Iowa, for example. There is something incomplete that lingers, Trails off And a pause — That lengthens And goes on — and on. Strand by strand, The rope breaks. The fingertips cannot remember The last thing they touched. The boat pulls away from the dock — The old confusion Between forgetting and loss. Then a series of notes played more slowly, Softer, Echoing — remotely, precisely — The previous phrase, Almost a melody, On the edge — A very slow waterfall Suggesting completeness, Gifts Exchanged In the interstices of the stars. Robert Rehder

My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably. George Bernard Shaw

After the final no there comes a yes And on that yes the future world depends. No was the night. Yes is this present sun. If the rejected things, the things denied, Slid over the western cataract, yet one, One only, one thing that was firm, even No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech Of the self that must sustain itself on speech, One thing remaining, infallible, would be  Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing! Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart, Green in the body, out of a petty phrase, Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed: The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps, The aureole above the humming house . . .  It can never be satisfied, the mind, never. Wallace Stevens

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

I pass you in a hurry, on my way to where another woman who I know is dying of a stroke that in the end is nothing worse than what is killing you. Same gurney, same bruised arms and mute IV— you wait for what might be a final test. It's something in the way you look at me that makes me realize you have your own mistakes you think you're paying for, your own ungrateful kids, your own unspeakable pain. Yet you look at me, still desperate for just another human being to look kindly back at you, to recognize in you the end is not far off, is not so unimaginable. Years ago I watched a patient of mine say goodbye to life. She was alone like you, alone like me, she was in agony. She looked at me, and I, afraid to be the last thing here on Earth she saw, twisted my head to look away. I almost do the same to you, afraid you might imagine me as later you lay dying, but I don't. Instead, I look at you remorselessly, the way I hope that someday I am seen, the w...

Late October and the pitiless drift begins in earnest. And all that whispered in the pockets of summer's green uniform is shaken out and dumped. My mimosa knew, for wasn't that death fingering the leaves all summer? Yet the tree plumped its pods, spending all July squeezing them out, going about its business, as did the slash pine and loblolly, spraying pollen—coating windows, cars, filling every idle slit with sperm. What does life mean but itself? Ask the sea. You'll get a wet slap back- handed across your mouth. Ask the tiger. I dare you. And your life, with its tedium of suffering, what does it mean but what it is? And mine—balancing checkbooks and whomping up a mess of vittles as my son used to say. My son, the funny one, the always-hungry-for-supper- and-the-happy-ending- I-was-never-able-to-give-him one. Who am I to write the user's manual for a life, except to say, Look at trees, dug in and defiant. Be like the river. Stick ...

How the Visiting Poet Ended up in the Abandoned Nike Missile Silo in Pacific, Missouri, After Surviving a Morning of Grade-School Classroom Appearances on Behalf of One of the Better Impulses in  the History of Human Behavior i. Because it was lunchtime, and I wasn't hungry.  Because I asked the man with the keys. And because most people had stopped asking years ago, he gladly walked me down the road, through acres of wheat, under the no-longer-electrifying fence to an overgrown mound of concrete where a pair of doors, ridiculously thick, angled into the ground. He sprang the padlocks, and then with his crowbar we pried and pulled until those doors finally gave. He showed me down a long staircase by flashlight until we hit bottom, standing suddenly in the middle of another one of those it-seemed-like-a-pretty-good-idea-at-the-time cockeyed Cold War motifs: a cavernous bunker out of nowhere, one of four whose aim was protecting St. Louis in the tenuous '50s and ...