a shandean commonplace book

Heavy, helpless, carefully manhandled Upstairs every night in a wooden chair She sat in all day as the sun sundialled Window-splays across the quiet floor . . . Her body heat had entered the braced timber Two would take hold of, by weighted leg and back, Tilting and hoisting, the one on the lower step Bearing the brunt, the one reversing up Not averting eyes from her hurting bulk, And not embarrassed, but never used to it. I think of her warm brow we might have once Bowed to and kissed before we kissed it cold. Seamus Heaney

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand. George Eliot

Some springs, apples bloom too soon. The trees have grown here for a hundred years, and are still quick to trust that the frost has finished. Some springs, pink petals turn black. Those summers, the orchards are empty and quiet. No reason for the bees to come. Other summers, red apples beat hearty in the trees, golden apples glow in sheer skin. Their weight breaks branches, the ground rolls with apples, and you fall in fruit. You could say,  I have been foolish . You could say,  I have been fooled . You could say,  Some years, there are apples. Rose McLarney

Are we born to take care only of ourselves? Eliza Haywood

The aspen glitters in the wind. And that delights us. The leaf flutters, turning, Because that motion in the heat of summer Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf Of the cottonwood. The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem And the tree danced. No. The tree capitalized. No. There are limits to saying. In language, what the tree did. It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us. Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will . Aspens doing something in the wind. Robert Haas

When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included? Mary Oliver

One night when the lawn was a golden green and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered what I would become—and where I would find myself— and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard my name as if for the first time, heard it the way one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off as thought it belonged not to me but to the silence from which it had come and to which it would go. Mark Strand

Solitude has but one disadvantage; it is apt to give one too high an opinion of one's self. In the world we are sure to be often reminded of every known or supposed defect we may have. Byron

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need anymore of that sound. So if you're going to do it and can't stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can't hold it in, at least go by yourself across the forty fields and the forty dark inclines of rocks and water to the place where the falls are flinging out their white sheets like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that jubilation and water fun and you can stand there, under it, and roar all you want and nothing will be disturbed; you can drip with despair all afternoon and still, on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched by the passing foil of the water, the thrush, puffing out its spotted breast, will sing of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything. Mary Oliver

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country. Alexis de Tocqueville

1. The Dream Later that now long lost night in December, beside you, I saw that the leaves had returned to the branches outside my window. Now that is all that it was: leaves, blowing in the windy sunlight: somehow, in spite of the chances against it occurring, in spite of the critic's wan sneer, I dreamed this gorgeous thing. 2.  Minneapolis, 1960 Children in a classroom peer into microscopes. Bombsights it occurs to the young woman moving from one to another, peripherally mesmerized by the second hand, trees flailing dimly in windows. 3. On the Run Winter hours, white dune grass. Secret pinewoods to the ocean — now what? 4. The Blackout: First Anniversary It finds me in Port Authority, penniless, seated at a bar unable to remember how I came there (why is obvious). Do you know this terror — not to remember? I go to the men’s room and look in the mirror, look in his aggrieved and music-haunted eye...

My experience is what I agree to attend to. William James

The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. Derek Walcott

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett

My childhood room: my bed, the curtained sky above the neighbor's roof; storm windows, square just-vacuumed carpet; dresser, desk, and chair; a life in drawers, preserved against the day I might require it. Home is where you stay-- where now I stay at Christmas every year, beside myself: boxed with the past, unsure what place is left my heart can verify. But worst: he stays here with me, out of sight, holding his secret expectations tight, turning his clear new mind to every whim-- games, insects, foreign coins, math, fairy tales . . . Or lies awake. And I know what he feels, there waiting, deceived, for me to happen to him. Greg Foster

Everything has been thought of before; the task is to think of it again. Goethe

Sleep softly my old love my beauty in the dark night is a dream we have as you know as you know night is a dream you know an old love in the dark around you as you go without end as you know in the night where you go sleep softly my old love without end in the dark in the love that you know W. S. Merwin

A great many things keep happening, some good, some bad. Gregory of Tours, 6th century

For eleven years I have regretted it, regretted that I did not do what I wanted to do as I sat there those four hours watching her die. I wanted to crawl in among the machinery and hold her in my arms, knowing the elementary, leftover bit of her mind would dimly recognize it was me carrying her to where she was going. Jack Gilbert

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

There is a moment after you move your eye away when you forget where you are because you've been living, it seems, somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky. You've been stopped being here in the world. You're in a different place, a place where human life has no meaning. You're not a creature in a body. You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity. Then you're in the world again. At night, on a cold hill, taking the telescope apart. You realize afterward not that the image is false but the relation is false. You see again how far away each thing is from every other thing. Louise Glück

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. Milan Kundera

  Feather duster in a child’s grip swished over bottles of Old Grand-Dad in my father’s liquor store, my hand hovering briefly above rolls of coin in the cash drawer, other objects stolen from local merchants – a magnifying glass, a hi-lo thermometer, an Indian rubber baseball, novelties, candy, cigarettes: If you wouldn't give me what I deserved, what you seemed to promise, then I would take it from you. The splendor of scissors. The consideration of a rubber stamp "for your attention." At some point, after the accumulation of the objects of desire, and later, after they became unforgettable, beyond understanding and useless, this is when I looked back and saw the boy making a daring effort to be part of the family’s sadness. All of the grief that preceded me – war, fire, the destruction of culture, the powerlessness of parents, the compensations of shameful inward lives – this, I perceived, is ...

Describe things as better than they are and you’ll be called a romantic; describe them as worse than they are and they’ll call you a realist; describe them exactly as they are and you’ll be thought of as a satirist. Quentin Crisp

A white room and a party going on and I was standing with some friends under a large gilt-framed mirror that tilted slightly forward over the fireplace. We were drinking whiskey and some of us, feeling no pain, were trying to decide what precise shade of yellow the setting sun turned our drinks. I closed my eyes briefly, then looked up into the mirror: a woman in a green dress leaned against the far wall. She seemed distracted, the fingers of one hand fidgeted with her necklace, and she was staring into the mirror, not at me, but past me, into a space that might be filled by someone yet to arrive, who at that moment could be starting the journey which would lead eventually to her. Then, suddenly, my friends said it was time to move on. This was years ago, and though I have forgotten where we went and who we all were, I still recall that moment of looking up and seeing the woman stare past me into a place I could only imagine,...

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they should be. William Hazlitt

                                         A mote it is to trouble the mind’s eye. They wandered out of gloom Into some golden shaft Of late-afternoon light, Those tiny filaments That filled me with delight, Lifted by an updraft Or viewless influence There in the living room. They might be minuscule Angels, it seemed to me, Needing no wings to rise Or slide back out of sigt But floating effortlessly Through our interior skies, Each incandescent mite A pilot at flight school. Their rises, their declines, Resembled Jacob’s dream And seemed an allegory Enacted just for me There in my own sunbeam But swathed in mystery— Some esoteric story Wrought in encoded signs: One more of the shrewd, well-tried Ways that a child is kept From some shrouded, grownup truth, Probably linked with tears; For the one thing clear to youth Is...

When I see a black man smiling like that, nodding and smiling with both hands visible, mouthing “Yes, officer,” across the street, I think of my father, who taught us the words “coöperate,” “officer,” to memorize badge numbers, who has seen black men shot at from behind in the warm months north. And I think of the fine line — hairline, eyelash, fingernail paring — the whisper that separates obsequious from safe. Armstrong, Johnson, Robinson, Mays. A woman with a yellow head of cotton-candy hair stumbles out of a bar at after-lunchtime clutching a black man’s arm as if for her life. And the brother smiles, and his eyes are flint as he watches all sides of the street. Elizabeth Alexander

All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere.  That is all that the world is. Aleksander Hemon

In the country of the ochre afternoon it is always still and hot, the dry leaves stirring infrequently with the rattling pods of what they call “women’s tongues,” in the afternoon country the far hills are very quiet and heat-hazed, but mostly in the middle of the country of the afternoon I see the brown heat of the skin of my first love, so still, so perfect, so unaltered, and I see how she walked with her sunburnt hands against the still sea almonds, to a remembered cove, where she stood on the small dock— that was when I thought we were immortal and that love would be folded doves and folded oars and water lapping against eroding stone in the ochre country of the afternoon. Derek Walcott

Why did we forget to talk about love? We had all the time in the world. What we forgot, I heard a voice Behind me say, was everything else. Love will leave us alone if we let it. Besides, the world has no time for us, The tree no questions of the flower, One more day no help for all this night. J. D. McClatchy from "Three Dreams about Elizabeth Bishop"

Once in a small rented room, awaiting a night call from a distant time zone, I understood you could feel so futureless you’d want to get a mermaid tattooed on your biceps. Company forever. Flex and she’d dance. The phone never rang, except for those phantom rings, which I almost answered. I was in D.C., on leave from the Army. It was a woman, of course, who didn’t call. Or, as we said back then, a girl. It’s anybody’s story. But I think for me it was the beginning of empathy, not a large empathy like the deeply selfless might have, more like a leaning, like being able to imagine a life for a spider, a maker’s life, or just some aliveness in its wide abdomen and delicate spinnerets so you take it outside in two paper cups instead of stepping on it. The next day she called, and it was final. I remember going to the zoo and staring a long time at the hippopotamus, its enormous weight and mass, its strange appearance of tranq...

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. Richard Steele