a shandean commonplace book

You stand in the brook, mud smearing your forearms, a bloodied mosquito on your brow, your yellow T-shirt dampened to your chest as the current flees between your legs, amber, verdigris, unraveling today's story, last night's travail . . . You stare at the father beaver, eye to eye, but he outstares you—you who trespass in his world, who have, however unwilling, yanked out his fort, stick by tooth-gnarled, mud-clabbered stick, though you whistle vespers to the wood thrush and trace flame-flicker in the grain of yellow birch. Death outpaces us. Upended roots of fallen trees still cling to moss-furred granite. Lichen smolders on wood-rot, fungus trails in wisps. I wanted a day with cracks, to let the godlight in. The forest is always a nocturne, but it gleams, the birch tree tosses its change from palm to palm, and we who unmake are ourselves unmade if we know, if only we know how to give ourselves in this untendered light.             Rosanna Warren

Stumble to silence, all you uneasy things, That pack the day with bluster and with fret. For here is music at each window set; Here is a cup which drips with all the springs That ever bud a cowslip flower; a roof To shelter till the argent weathers break; A candle with enough of light to make My courage bright against each dark reproof. A hand's width of clear gold, unraveled out The rosy sky, the little moon appears; As they were splashed upon the paling red, Vast, blurred, the village poplars lift about. I think of young, lost things: of lilacs; tears; I think of an old neighbor, long since dead. Lizette Woodworth Reese

How do you ever know for certain that you are doing the right thing?                         Anthony Doerr

Everyone’s always alone on the earth’s breast pierced by a ray of sunlight: and suddenly it’s evening     Salvatore Quasimodo translated by Gian Lombardo

There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.  Arundhati Roy

Peonies are the only flower I care for and when I saw them from the window yesterday, tumbled and heavy along a fence, fully exploded, nodding at the ground, hanging their heads but not yet spoiled, I remembered a summer (maybe seven years ago, or was it ten?) I wasn't sure our love would come again, and here I am, almost kissing the grass like that, bursting and rich, cracked all over like broken cake— makes you cry but still sweet. Deborah Garrison

All essences of sweetness from the white Warm day go up in vapor, when the dark Comes down. Ascends the tune of meadow-lark, Ascends the noon-time smell of grass, when night Takes sunlight from the world, and gives it ease. Mysterious wings have brushed the air; and light Float all the ghosts of sense and sound and sight; The silent hive is echoing the bees. So stir my thoughts at this slow, solemn time. Now only is there certainty for me When all the day's distilled and understood. Now light meets darkness: now my tendrils climb In this vast hour, up the living tree, Where gloom foregathers, and the stern winds brood. Genevieve Taggard

It is a great nuisance that knowledge can be acquired only by hard work. W. Somerset Maugham

It was not our duty to question but to guard, maintaining order; see that none escaped who may be required for questioning by the State. The price was bread and a pension and not a hard life on the whole. There was some scraped enough on the side to build up a fairish estate for the day of retirement. I never could understand the complaints of the restless ones who found the hours long, time dragging: it always does. The old hands knew how good the guardroom fire could be, the guns gleaming against the wall and the nagging wind like a wife outside. There were cards for such occasions and good companions who truly were more than home since they shared one's working life without difference or hard words, aimed at much the same thing, and shared opinions or news they had read. If they cared much it was for the quiet life. You cannot hold that against them, since it's roundly human and any decent man would want it the same. And these were decent; did as they were told, fed prisoner

When, during a weekend in Venice while standing     with the dark sky above the Grand Canal exploding in arcs of color and light, a man behind me begins to explain     the chemical composition of the fireworks and how potassium-something-ate and sulfur catalyze to make the gold waterfall of stars cascading     in the moon-drunk sky, I begin to understand why the Inquisition tortured Galileo and see how it might be a good thing for people     to think the sun revolves around the earth. You don’t have to know how anything works to be bowled over by beauty,     but with an attitude like mine we’d still be swimming in a sea of smallpox and consumption, not to mention plague, for these fireworks     are in celebration of the Festival of the Redentore, or Christ the Redeemer, whose church on the other side of the canal was build after the great plague     of 1575 to thank him for saving Venice, though by that time 46,000 were dead, and I suppose God had made his point if indeed he had one.  

The verb in a Sanscrit or Farsi or Latin or Japanese sentence most frequently comes last, as if the ingredients and spices only after collection, measure and even preservation might get cooked. To all these cuisines renown attaches. It's the opening of a Celtic sentence is a verb. And it was more fire and pot for us very often than ingredients. Had we not fed our severed heads on poetry final might have been our fame's starvation. Upholding cuisine for us are the French to be counting in scores and called Gallic. In English and many more, in Chinese the verb surrounds itself nucleus-fashion with its subjects and qualifiers. Down every slope of the wok they go to the spitting middle, to be sauced, ladled, lidded, steamed, flipped back up, becoming verbs themselves often and the calm egg centres the meatloaf Les Murray

Daily dawns another day; I must up, to make my way. Though I dress and drink and eat, Move my fingers and my feet, Learn a little, here and there, Weep and laugh and sweat and swear, Hear a song, or watch a stage, Leave some words upon a page, Claim a foe, or hail a friend— Bed awaits me at the end. Though I go in pride and strength, I'll come back to bed at length. Though I walk in blinded woe, Back to bed I'm bound to go. High my heart, or bowed my head, All my days but lead to bed. Up, and out, and on; and then Ever back to bed again, Summer, Winter, Spring, and Fall— I'm a fool to rise at all! Dorothy Parker

It was like his teaching her to ride a bicycle in the driveway that fall, him calling out “I've got you,” which meant he planned to let go any moment. He made her try again, again; she crashed the yellow Schwinn into the elm, cried and called him names. If she could have looked back and kept her balance the last time he shoved her out of his hands, she would have seen him griefstruck, still, shrinking as she wobbled from his shadow, into the sun-dappled road. Katrina Vandenberg

The speaker points out that we don't really have much of a grasp of things, not only the big things, the important questions, but the small everyday things. "How many steps up to your back yard? What is the name of your district representative? What did you have for breakfast? What is your wife's shoe size? Can you tell me the color of your sweetheart's eyes? Do you remember where you parked the car?" The evidence is overwhelming. Most of us never truly experience life. "We drift through life in daydream, missing the true richness and joy that life has to offer." When the speaker has finished we gather around to sing a few inspirational songs. You and I stand at the back of the group and hum along since we have forgotten most of the words. Louis Jenkins

We are cutting weeds and sunflowers on the shoulder, the gray man and I, red dust coiling up around us, muddying our sweat-smeared mugs, clogging our hair, the iron heel of an August Kansas sun pushing down on the scythes we raise against it and swing down in an almost homicidal rage and drunken weariness. And I keep my distance. He's a new hire just off the highway, a hitchhiker sick to death of hunger, the cruelties of the road, and our boss hates poverty just enough to hire it, even this old man, a dead, leaden pall upon his skin so vile it makes you pull away, the gray trousers and state-issue black prison boots, the bloodless, grim, unmoving lips, and the eyes set in concrete, dark hallways that lead to darker rooms down somewhere in the basement of the soul's despair. Two weeks. He hasn't said a word. He's a goddamned ghost, I tell my father. Light flashes from his scythe as he decapitates big clumps of yellow blooms, a flailing, brutal war against the lords of la

The comet was still hanging in the sky that year at Pesach, and of course the full moon, as every year. After the bulk of the seder, after the long rich redolent meal, we all went out on the road walking away from the house whose lights we had dimmed. There on the velvet playing field of night we saw the moon rolling toward us like a limestone millwheel the whole sky pouring to fill our heads a little drunk with the sweet wine so that the stars sank in with a whisper like a havdalah candle doused in wine giving a little electric buzz to the brain. Then we saw it, the comet like the mane of a white lion, something holy to mark this one more Passover with all of us together, my old commune mates, friends from here and the city, children I have known since birth, all standing with our faces turned up like pale sunflowers to the icy fire. Then we went back to the house, drank the last cup and sang till we were hoarse. Marge Piercy

There are days when you wake and your body feels too long or too short, like a shirt shrunk in the wash, or a fisherman’s net that has somehow ensnared you, and it feels as if your body were swapped in the night for the body of a stranger, and your whole day is spent searching. Whose body am I wearing, where has my old self gone off to? If it is winter, then it is raining. If summer, then the day is thick with humidity and hot, and fat clouds jerk across the sky like stupid thoughts. These are the days when closets are searched, when you find yourself standing in a corner of the cellar not knowing how you got there, when your body keeps slipping from your shoulders or gripping you too tightly around the neck; when you yell at your wife without reason and your children avoid you and the dog hides under a bush. But then sometimes it happens that late in the afternoon, you decide that the body you are wearing belongs to someone you knew as a child, a kid up the street or a girl with brace

I hear an elevator sweating in New Orleans, Water folding black on black in tanks deep under Carthage, Unfracked oil in Lancashire, And what you’re thinking. It’s the truth — There goes your silent count to ten, the held breath Of forbearance, all the language not yet spoken Or unspeakable, the dark side of the page. But this is not about you. I can hear The sea drawn back from Honshu, Hookers in the holding pen, and logorrhea In the dreaded Quiet Coach, The firestorm of random signs On market indices, the bull, the bear, The sound of one hand clapping and the failure of the rains, The crackle of the dried-out stars, Stars being born, anomalies and either/or, The soundtrack of creation in an unrecorded vowel, The latest that might be the last, the leading edge Of all that is the case or is not there. “The contradictions cover such a range.” And I’m told that soon it will be easier To balance out the love-cry and the howl, To wear an aid and act my age, to hear the world Behind this wor

Having slept in a turnout in the backseat of her car, she awoke before dawn, shivering, hungover, unsure of where she was. To her surprise, the sodium lights on the billboard she had parked beside were no longer on. Wind gusts, the smell of rain, the raw, unbroken landscape like a field of ice. If this had been a movie, someone would've been sitting up front, someone who held her fate in his hands. Though she couldn't see them, she could hear birds passing overhead. Why do they even bother to cross so vast and empty a space? At the moment, none of the usual explanations made sense. Her head ached, her feet were cold, she couldn't find the words. And the man up front, what did he think? What would he do? Must something still happen before the end? Sherod Santos

The flashlight my sister swept across the heavens got no response either. When my brother leaves his lab, he’s still limping and our governor’s demanding funerals for aborted fetuses and where’s a fetus gonna get the scratch for that? So yes, there are dark shapes in doorways. Can’t be helped. Today, I found a chunk of amethyst with a face inside you could tell was willing to wait another million years for its scream to come out so let that be a lesson. Ditto the same cuckoo that followed Tomaz out of China tries to follow me but gets slapped back in security and I don’t just don’t. Maybe Jay’s right that it all comes down to one untranslatable fragment of Parmenides. Like when a dead child is covered with petals or a goat receives a garland of bells. It’s a thin red thread that holds the soul to the earth. Visibility is a disguise. Dean Young

        in memory of Seth Walsh, Justin Aaberg, Billy Lucas, and Tyler Clementi There are those who suffer in plain sight, there are those who suffer in private. Nothing but secondhand details: a last shower, a request for a pen, a tall red oak. There are those who suffer in private. The one in Tehachapi, aged 13. A last shower, a request for a pen, a tall red oak: he had had enough torment, so he hanged himself. The one in Tehachapi, aged 13; the one in Cooks Head, aged 15: he had had enough torment, so he hanged himself. He was found by his mother. The one in Cooks Head, aged 15. The one in Greensburg, aged 15: he was found by his mother. "I love my horses, my club lambs. They are the world to me," the one in Greensburg, aged 15, posted on his profile. "I love my horses, my club lambs. They are the world to me." The words turn and turn on themselves. Posted on his profile, "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry": the words turn, and turn on themselves, like th

 *Everybody dies*, Bob Roberts, the crooked fight promoter, tells Charlie Davis early in "Body and Soul," and it's the line Charlie throws back at him like a perfect counterpunch at the close of the film. The fix was in -- go the distance and lose the decision -- But Charlie refused to take a dive, thereby losing sixty grand but regaining his soul and his long-suffering true love. *What're you gonna do, kill me? Everybody dies*, Charlie says, and he and his true love go laughing into the final frame. In the alternate ending, written but never shot, Charlie's killed and stuffed into a trashcan. What difference if the audience leaves the theater believing Charlie's still out there somewhere, working a cash register like his mother or teaching neighborhood kids the value of a left hook to the ribs, an uppercut to the jaw? Everybody dies. John Garfield, who played Charlie and was notorious in Hollywood for screwing all the starlets, died in a hotel room at thirty-

Yes, there was a tree, and upon it, among the wax leaves, an order of fruit which hung plentifully, glazed with dew of a given morning. And there had been some talk off and on – nothing specific – about forgiving the inclination to eat of it. But sin had very little to do with this or with any outright prohibition. For sin had made its entrance long before the serpent spoke, long before the woman and the man had set their teeth to the pale, stringy flesh, which was, it turns out, also quite without flavor. Rather, sin had come in the midst of an evening stroll, when the woman had reached to take the man's hand and he withheld it. In this way, the beginning of our trouble came to the garden almost without notice. And in later days, as the man and the woman wandered idly about their paradise, as they continued to enjoy the sensual pleasures of food and drink and spirited coupling even as they sat marveling at the approach of evening and the more lush approach of sleep, they found wit

With rod and tackle box, I'm slogging through soft sand, a red sun going down in the surf, swag-belly clouds drifting in with Ray, only two months dead, going on about girls that summer we studied French in Québec and guzzled Labatts at the Chien d'Or , about how he'll marry again, keep at it until he gets it right— Pas vrai? Above the tide wrack, a woman in a two-piece with half my years kneels struggling in the sand with a pillow of feathers, one wing flapping—a pelican tangled in fish line, treble hook in the bill pouch, the other in its wing. Ray says, Ask her out for a drink but she says, Could you give me a hand? I drop the tackle and secure the wing while she croons to calm him and with one free hand untangles the line. With pliers from the tackle box, I expose the barbs and carefully clip, a total of six loud snaps. Then I hold the bird while she frees the last tangle and we step back, join the onlookers, a father explaining c

not for me the dogma of the period preaching order and a sure conclusion and no not for me the prissy formality or tight-lipped fence of the colon and as for the semi- colon call it what it is a period slumming with the commas a poser at the bar feigning liberation with one hand tightening the leash with the other oh give me the headlong run-on fragment dangling its feet over the edge give me the sly comma with its come-hither wave teasing all the characters on either side give me ellipses not just a gang of periods a trail of possibilities or give me the sweet interrupting dash the running leaping joining dash all the voices gleeing out over one another oh if I must punctuate give me the YIPPEE of the exclamation point give me give me the curling cupping curve mounting the period with voluptuous uncertainty Elizabeth Austen