a shandean commonplace book

No ball, no rules.  Any one boy On the cinder playground Raises his hand and yells I Got It And a few others chase him reaching To touch him and the great Game begins. At first maybe four or five Charge after him and one tags him And yells I Got It and then more Join the pack lunging ager the new Leader, the pursued one Who sprints and dodges, head-feints Nearly out of breath, writhing Out of reach. No end, no score. Thrill of the broken-field run in football, but Pure: no boundaries, no goal. No teams.  Aristocratic martial Rhythm of anarchy and brilliance, The one against the many: I remember a heavyset boy named Carl Who liked to keep the chain-link Fence to his back, even Leaning against it, side-faking or pulling His chubby belly back, and every time a boy Touched him, I Got It, Carl Dancing tagged him back With rope-a-dope hands I Got It Back on the tagging arm, Carl Unwinded at bay unyielding. Some...

That which is loved is always beautiful. Norwegian proverb

You are invulnerable.  Have they not granted you, those powers that preordain your destiny, the certainty of dust?  Is not your time as irreversible as that same river where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol of fleeting life?  A marble slab awaits you which you will not read—on it, already written, the date, the city, and the epitaph. Other men, too, are only dreams of time, not indestructible bronze or burnished gold; the universe is, like you, a Proteus. Dark, you will enter the darkness that expects you, doomed to the limits of your travelled time. Know that in some sense you are already dead. Jorge Luis Borges (trans. Alastair Reid)

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. Harry S. Truman

Heart sits on a stump in the backyard, dog turds, custed snow lie all around. A window opens, a voice shouts: Come on back, Heart! But Heart won’t budge. You see, there is a dark place in the sky despite the noon sun and lack of clouds A spot above the oak branch on the right, like a dark splatter of spilled black point. If you stretched out your arm, your hand could almost cover it. Heart can’t explain it. It feels like sadness but why is there sadness? Heart sleeps okay, eats okay, moves his bowels just right. It feels like despair but why is there despair? Heart has pals, no big bills, and the roof doesn’t leak. As far as Heart can tell, life is going well. The spot shimmers a bit and Heart thinks: It’s showing me that it knows I am here. He imagines the dark spot leaving its home in the morning — can sadness be preexisting? Could it fix like a tick on its victim’s neck? But perhaps this is someone else’s sadness and off on another street a...

I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions. Augusten Burroughs

They sat there, nine women, much the same age, The same poppy-red hair, and similar complexions Freckling much the same in the summer glare, The same bright eyes of green melting to blue Melting to golden brown, they sat there, Nine women, all of them very quiet, one Perhaps, was looking at her nails, one plaited her hair in narrow strands, one stared at a stone, One let fall a mangled flower from her hands, All nine of them very quiet, and the one who spoke Said, softly: "Of course he was very charming, and he smiled, Introduced himself and said he'd heard good things, Shook hands all round, greeted us by name, Assured us it would all be much the same, Explained his policies, his few minor suggestions Which we would please observe.  He looked forward To working with us.  Wouldn't it be fun?  Happy To answer any questions. Any questions?  But None of us spoke or raised her hand, and questions There were none:  what has ...

There is nothing so innocent that men cannot turn it to crime; nothing so beneficial that its values cannot be reversed; nothing so good in itself that it cannot be put to bad uses. Molière

In the dark cave of Slovenia,     40,000 years of utter silence. No one to lift this leg bone of bear. Two finger-holes punched through     to take the mortal breath away, end open to let out the skein of tones closer to human moan     than human moan, hoot of moon wind-honed, horned, fervid scents, fevered puddles of bison blood, beak     and breath of Gray Father, steam of Mother Milk. We didn't know Neanderthals had an ear.     We didn't know they beatified their dead with color. In petal, pistil, stamen they invented     prayer, and on the first flute the closer-to-beastly unkin of us worked, out of starless dark,     the melodies of bear, and birds lifting offat dawn. The cave is a flute, the skull is a flute     for wish to move through, true, eye and nose hole waiting for the skill to finger out ou...

The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world. Vikram Chandra

Is the world half-empty or half-full? J. D. McClatchy

Entering the lonely house with my wife,       I saw him for the first time     Peering furtively from behind a bush--             Blackness that moved,       A shape amid the shadows,     A momentary glimpse of gleaming eyes       Revealed in the ragged moon.     A closer look (he seemed to turn) might have     Put him to flight forever--       I dared not     (For reasons that I failed to understand),       Though I knew I should act at once.     I puzzled over it, hiding alone,     Watching the woman as she neared the gate.       He came, and I saw him crouching             Night after night. ...

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. Thomas Carlyle

I see her doing something simple, paying bills, or leafing through a magazine or book, and wish that I could say, and she could hear, that now I start to understand her love for all of us, the fullness of it. It burns there in the past, beyond my reach, a modest lamp. David Young

is not silent, it is a speaking- out-loud voice in your head: it is spoken, a voice is saying it as you read.  It’s the writer’s words, of course, in a literary sense his or her “voice” but the sound of that voice is the sound of your voice. Not the sound your friends know or the sound of a tape played back but your voice caught in the dark cathedral of your skill, your voice heard by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts and what you know by feeling, having felt.  It is your voice saying, for example, the word “barn” that the writer wrote but the “barn” you say is a barn you know or knew.  the voice in your head, speaking as your read, never says anything neutrally—some people hated the barn they knew, some people love the barn they know so you hear the word loaded and a sensory constellation is lit: horse-gnawed stalls, hayloft, black heat tape wrapping a water pipe, a slippery spilled chirrr of oats from...

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on. Robert Frost

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough . . . . I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea. There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well, All things please the soul, but these please the soul well. Walt Whitman

When they taught me that what mattered most was not the strict iambic line goose-stepping over the page but the variations in that line and the tension produced on the ear by the surprise of difference, I understood yet didn't understand exactly, until just now, years later in spring, with the trees already lacy and camellias blowsy with middle age I looked out and saw what a cold front had done to the garden, sweeping in like common language, unexpected in the sensuous extravagance of a Maryland spring. There was a dark edge around each flower as if it had been outlined in ink instead of frost, and the tension I felt between the expected and actual was like the time I came to you, ready to say goodbye for good, for you had been a cold front yourself lately, and as I walked in you laughed and lifted me up in your arms as if I too were lacy with spring instead of middle aged like the camellias, and I thought: So this is Poetry. ...

Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It has something to do with ugliness, even more, perhaps, with aggression, but horseflies inspire no affection, even though they’re superb pilots. Maybe because once they were squirmy, furry things, butterflies seem content with their sudden beauty, no interest tin getting anywhere fast. The small brown bird outside my window has a lilt and a tune.  Elsewhere, a baby is screeching.  Watch out, little ones, there are hawks, there are sleep-deprived parents, utterly beside themselves. When I was a child I claimed a grasshopper hopped over a rock like a rockhopper. “He likes to play with language,” my mother told her friends. “He’s so smart.” She used to hide money in coffee can, place it behind the wooden matches in the cupboard.  I swear I never stole it. She was beautiful, as was our neighbor with the red jewel on her forehead. That there’s so little justice in the world— one of them believed, the other experienced....

Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine, something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly muscular.  We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like— though evidence suggests eight complexly folded scuttling works of armament, crowned by the foreclaws’ gesture of menace and power.  A gull’s gobbled the center, leaving this chamber —size of a demitasse— open to reveal a shocking, Giotto blue. Though it smells of seaweed and ruin, this little travelling case comes with such lavish lining! Imagine breathing surrounded by the brilliant rinse of summer’s firmament. What color is the underside of skin? Not so bad, to die, if we could be opened into  this — if the smallest chambers of ourselves, similarly, revealed some sky. Mark Doty

 In these red labyrinths of London I find that I have chosen the strangest of all callings, save that, in its way, any calling is strange. Like the alchemist who sought the philosopher's stone in quicksilver, I shall make everyday words-- the gambler's marked cards, the common coin-- give off the magic that was theirs when Thor was both the god and the din, the thunderclap and the prayer. In today's dialect I shall say, in my fashion, eternal things: I shall try to be worthy of the great echo of Byron. This dust that I am will be invulnerable. If a woman shares my love my verse will touch the tenth sphere of the concentric heavens; if a woman turns my love asideI will make of my sadness a music, a full river to resound through time. I shall live by forgetting myself. I shall be the face I glimpse and forget, I shall be Judas who takes on the divine mission of being a betrayer, I shall be Caliban in his bog, I shall be a mer...

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties. Francis Bacon