a shandean commonplace book

We must be the only ones left, in the mist that has risen everywhere as well as in these woods I walk across the bridge towards the safety of high ground (the tops of the trees are like islands) gathering the sunken bones of the drowned mothers (hard and round in my hands) while the white mist washes around my legs like water; fish must be swimming down in the forest beneath us, like birds, from tree to tree and a mile away the city, wide and silent, is lying lost, far undersea. You saunter beside me, talking of the beauty of the morning, not even knowing that there has been a flood, tossing small pebbles at random over your shoulder into the deep thick air, not hearing the first stumbling footsteps of the almost-born coming (slowly) behind us, not seeing the almost-human brutal faces forming (slowly) out of stone. Margaret Atwood

It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light.                        Thelonious Monk

Where I am going now I don't yet know: I have, it appears, no destination, no plan. In fact no particular longing to go on anymore, at the moment, the cold weightless fingers encircling my neck to make me recite, one more time, the great reasons for being alive. Permanent address: unknown. In the first place, we are not convinced I exist at all. And if I have a job it is to be that hour when the birds who sing all night long wake and cease one by one, and the last stars blaze and go out. It is to be the beam of morning in the room, the traveler at your front door; or, if you wake in the night, the one who is not at the door. The one who can see, from far off, what you hiddenly go through. The hammer's shadow in the shadow of a hand. No one, and the father of no one. Franz Wright

And if you’ve ever been to the lonely coast you’ve seen how the shore rock drops off into the black water and how the light on the point is final. Beyond are the old rollers coming on for millions of years. It is like that here at night but instead of the rollers its wind. But the water was here once. You think about the sea that covered this place hundreds of millions of years ago, the slow evaporations, mud turned to stone. There’s nothing calm in those thoughts. It isn’t finished, it can still tear apart. Nothing is finished. You take your chances.                        Annie Proulx   

The rain this morning falls on the last of the snow   and will wash it away. I can smell the grass again, and the torn leaves   being eased down into the mud. The few loves I’ve been allowed   to keep are still sleeping on the West Coast. Here in Virginia   I walk across the fields with only a few young cows for company.   Big-boned and shy, they are like girls I remember   from junior high, who never  spoke, who kept their heads   lowered and their arms crossed against  their new breasts. Those girls   are nearly forty now. Like me,  they must sometimes stand   at a window late at night, looking out  on a silent backyard, at one   rusting lawn chair and the sheer walls of other people’s houses.   They must lie down some afternoons and cry hard for whoever used   to make them happiest, and wonder how their lives   hav...

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.                        Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

Those blesséd structures, plot and rhyme -- why are they no help to me now I want to make something imagined, not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter's vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything I write with the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot, lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, heightened from life, yet paralyzed by fact. All's misalliance. Yet why not say what happened? Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name. Robert Lowell

Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable? W.E.B. Dubois

When the roof of the First Emperor of Qin’s tomb caved in, six thousand life-size terra-cotta soldiers knelt beneath its crumbling weight in the first pit, alongside horses & chariots. Centuries before, when the clay figures stood in perfect formation, the rebel general Xiang Yu looted this sanctuary of the dead, sequestering the bronze weapons honed by these bodyguards of the afterworld to kill their heirs of the charging drums & bells. All their bright regimental colors are eaten away. Their etched mouths are shaped for secret oaths. Their eyes can see into the old lost seasons, & their noses are dilated as if smelling lilies in a valley. Rank is carved into each topknot, tassel, & strand. The blind can read insignia grooved into the uniforms. In the second pit, in its L-shaped chamber, cavalrymen & horses with pricked ears peer out of the red earth, unbridled by time. Some warriors are sculpted in unbroken taijiquan stances. In the third pit,...

Via ovicapitum dura est. The way of the egghead is hard. Adlai Stevenson

For hours at this hole in the ice the boy pretended to be the last person alive, left with the task of testing the world's depths, pulling up line, measuring by arm's lengths. He'd feel the little tug of the metal weight and then all the lovely looseness of the line. This morning he'd heard his mother breaking dishes, his father sobbing with anger again, crying out, "For God's sake, for God's sake, Kay." He thought if he just tried hard enough, did one thing well, he might fix things, he'd bring home a fish just as if he were a normal kid in a normal family, and his mother would be so pleased, she'd get dressed, and the kitchen would fill with tarragon and butter and fish sizzling, that luxurious oily smell, and his father would open the windows at last, and the winter air, sharp and clean, would cut through the grease of too much happiness. Christopher Bursk

The best moments in reading are when you come across something, a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things that you’d thought special, particular to you. And there it is set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.                     Alan Bennett, The History Boys

The lindens are blossoming the lindens have lost their blossoms and this flowery procession moves without any restraint Where are you hurrying lilies of the valley jasmines petunias lilacs irises roses and peonies Mondays and Tuesdays Wednesdays and Fridays nasturtiums and gladioli zinnias and lobelias yarrow dill goldenrod and grasses flowery Mays and Junes and Julys and Augusts lakes of flowers seas of flowers meadows holy fires of fern one-day grails Tell me why this hurry where are you rushing in a cherry blizzard a deluge of greenness all with the wind racing in one direction only crowns proud yesterday today fallen into sand eternal desires passions mistresses of destruction Julia Hartwig

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must first do with diligence.                        Samuel Johnson

Left off the highway and down the hill. At the bottom, hang another left. Keep bearing left. The road will make a Y. Left again. There's a creek on the left. Keep going. Just before the road ends, there'll be another road. Take it and no other. Otherwise, your life will be ruined forever. There's a log house with a shake roof, on the left. It's not that house. It's the next house, just over a rise. The house where trees are laden with fruit. Where phlox, forsythia, and marigold grow. It's the house where the woman stands in the doorway wearing sun in her hair. The one who's been waiting all this time. The woman who loves you. The one who can say, "What's kept you?" Raymond Carver

There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.                        Raymond Williams

I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall — what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do. Mary Oliver

Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. W. Somerset Maugham

is what you first see, stepping off the train: a billboard brought to you in living English by Toshiba Electric. While a channel silent in the TV of the brain projects those flickering re-runs of a cloud that brims its risen columnful like beer and, spilling over, hangs its foamy head, you feel a thirst for history: what year it started to be safe to breathe the air, and when to drink the blood and scum afloat on the Ohta River. But no, the water's clear, they pour it for your morning cup of tea in one of the countless sunny coffee shops whose plastic dioramas advertise mutations of cuisine behind the glass: a pancake sandwich; a pizza someone tops with a maraschino cherry. Passing by the Peace Park's floral hypocenter (where how bravely, or with what mistaken cheer, humanity erased its own erasure), you enter the memorial museum and through more glass are served, as on a dish of blistered grass, three mannequins. Like gloves a mother clips to coatsl...

                           We think that by naming we can understand, as if the tongue were more than muscle.                        Gary Whitehead

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head Before he hurls the lightening? Well, just now He galloped his thunder cart and his horses Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth And the clogged underearth, the River Styx, The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself. Anything can happen, the tallest towers Be overturned, those in high places daunted, Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one, Setting it down bleeding on the next. Ground gives. The heaven's weight Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid. Capstones shift, nothing resettles right. Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away. Seamus Heaney

. . . love is a magnifying phenomenon . . . every increase in love strengthens all the other love in the world.                        Andrew Solomon

We hardly ever see the moon any more so no wonder it’s so beautiful when we look up suddenly and there it is gliding broken-faced over the bridges brilliantly coursing, soft, and a cool wind fans your hair over your forehead and your memories of Red Grooms’ locomotive landscape I want some bourbon/you want some oranges/I love the leather jacket Norman gave me and the corduroy coat David gave you, it is more mysterious than spring, the El Greco heavens breaking open and then reassembling like lions in a vast tragic veldt that is far from our small selves and our temporally united passions in the cathedral of Januaries everything is too comprehensible these are my delicate and caressing poems I suppose there will be more of those others to come, as in the past so many! but for now the moon is revealing itself like a pearl to my equally naked heart Frank O’Hara

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind!                        Henri-Frederic Amiel

As if death was an island: anyone could go there, on a slow ferry crowded with eyes and disembark at villages distilled to whitewash and cypress. As if you memorised the first cicadas and listened through eternity for change: the buttermilk coin melting beneath your tongue; the same crows wheeling in a wide hoop; a distant voice calling your name, worn smooth by constant use, a word you should, but do not, recognise. John Burnside

. . . love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?                        Diane Ackerman

Nothing in the room can go back. The ashes couldn’t be paper again, the paper couldn’t return to its parental linen rags. That arrow doesn’t reverse: the linen could never again be a possibility waiting, alive, inside the field of flax. Whatever’s recently happened in the room is beyond the boundary of this poem, but we know this: its people can’t go back to who they were before. And the light, here, now, or any light as the day goes forward, yours, or mine ... it can’t regain its first existence, at the start of things: an innocence. For once it touches the world, it becomes complicit. __________________ She’s left the room. He stays in the bed, below the covers, and when she exits the house —the door is audible—he curls up, bean of sadness that he is. Her travel is greedy, it needs the miles (by now she’s past the city limits). His is weaker, but ambitious, if by fetal position we mean a desire to travel the whole life-corridor back to its insular source. I’...

If you’re going to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.                        George Bernard Shaw

---from a photograph, circa 1912 In Millais's painting, Ophelia dies faceup, eyes and mouth open as if caught in the gasp of her last word or breath, flowers and reeds growing out of the pond, floating on the surface around her. The young woman who posed lay in a bath for hours, shivering, catching cold, perhaps imagining fish tangling in her hair or nibbling a dark mole raised upon her white skin. Ophelia's final gaze aims skyward, her palms curling open as if she's just said, Take me. I think of her when I see Bellocq's photograph--- a woman posed on a wicker divan, her hair spilling over. Around her, flowers--- on a pillow, on a thick carpet. Even the ravages of this old photograph bloom like water lilies across her thigh. How long did she hold there, this other Ophelia, nameless inmate in Storyville, naked, her nipples offered up hard with cold? The small mound of her belly, the pale hair of her pubis---these things---her body there f...

There is no language without deceit. Italo Calvino