a shandean commonplace book

We ran in all directions -- to the vest-pocket park or the blocked tunnel -- it was OK to run, there were guards in uniform lumbering beside us, we fell into a gait, not too fast, each terrified of stumbling or trampling a straggler. As in a dream you think *fire hydrant* and come to a hydrant, you think *father* and come to a father -- we were pure consequence, innocence, that force: *step, step, step*: but strangers bucked our tide, squeezing past us, searching our faces briefly, *not you, not you* -- they were the ones who had lost a child: then the crazies who live for the end of the world marched brandishing signs: *Repent*: at last the off-duty firemen called back from Bensonhurst came cradling their axes gingerly against their chests so we wouldn't be hurt, striding carefully, flattening themselves, turning to let us pass, keeping their eyes fixed on the plume and the radiance behind it. D. Nurkse

Everyone suddenly burst out singing And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom, Winging wildly across the white Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight. Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted; And beauty came like the setting sun: My heart was shaken with tears; and horror Drifted away . . .  O, but Everyone Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done. Siegfried Sassoon

The world seems so palpable And dense: people and things And the landscapes They inhabit or move through.   Words, on the other hand, Are so abstract—they’re Made of empty air Or black scratches on a page That urge us to utter Certain sounds.                           And us: Poised in the middle, aware Of the objects out there Waiting patiently to be named, As if the right words Could save them.                               And don’t They deserve it?     So much hidden inside each one, Such a longing To become the beloved.   And inside us: the sounds That could extend that blessing— How they crowd our mouths, How they press up against Our lips, which are such A narrow exit for a joy so desp...

Arriving late, my clinic having run past 6 again, I realize I don’t have cancer, don’t have HIV, like them, these students who are patients, who I lead in writing exercises, reading poems. For them, this isn’t academic, it’s reality:  I ask that they describe an object right in front of them, to make it come alive, and one writes about death, her death, as if by just imagining the softness of its skin, its panting rush into her lap, that she might tame it; one observes instead the love he lost, he’s there, beside him in his gown and wheelchair, together finally again.  I take a good, long breath; we’re quiet as newborns. The little conference room grows warm, and right before my eyes, I see that what I thought unspeakable was more than this, was hope. Rafael Campo

Three crisscrossed daffodils faint lamps in the rubble where without any warning I'm shattered by your absence wondering will I always blunder into this emotion so large and mute it has no name —not grief longing pain for those are only its suburbs its slightly distracting cousins— summoned just now by these frilled blossoms butter yellow horns on lemon yellow stars indifferent innocent charging in place advance guard of a season when I will join you. David Young

to call a woman ‘hysterical’ because you have not the knowledge necessary to deny her facts is the last refuge of the unmanly and the coward…I always felt when termed hysterical that I had triumphed because it meant my arguments cannot be met nor my statements denied…                         Emily Hobhouse [MS. Hobhouse 25].

here come the fireflies with their staccato lights their tiny headlamps blinking in silence through the tall grass like constellations cut loose from the night sky (see how desire transforms the plainest of us) or flashes of insight that flare for a moment then flicker out Linda Pastan

The pine fence rotted and collapsed, and then there was nothing between us and the abandoned lot of the fish- packing company, its wild outbuildings, the forges and pumps, the truck barn, the coopery, the workshops, silent and weedgrown, and the counting-house, ivy-choked and gone to pigeons and feral cats — and the lilac tree, stooped with blossoms, and my mother stealing among them like a ragged queen, snipping and gathering, filling milkbottles with the nodding clusters: she would choke the house's sorrows with the lilacs in the kitchen with its pinched windows, on the sills and shelves and sinkboard, on the red round table and the stove's back, and lilac water in the vases and jars -- and in every cluttered room, we, who tilled no gardens and tended nothing but the tedious rosary of one day at a time, suddenly rolling among the crowns of flowers, breathing whatever fever it was that sweetened the air for that one time, the time the dead fence crumbled and nothing stood betw...

At night the Universe grows lean, sober faced, of intoxication, The shadow of the half-sphere curtains down closely against my world, like a doorless cage, and the stillness chained by wrinkled darkness strains throughout the Uni- verse to be free. Listen, frogs in the pond, (the world is a pond itself)     cry out for the light, for the truth! The curtains rattle ghostlily along, bloodily biting     my soul, the winds knocking on my cabin door     with their shadowy hands. Yone Noguchi

A lot more malaise and a little more grief every day, aware that all seasons, the stormy, the sunlit, are brief every day. I don’t know the name of the hundredth drowned child, just the names of the oligarchs trampling the green, eating beef every day, while luminous creatures flick, stymied, above and around the plastic detritus that’s piling up over the reef every day. A tiny white cup of black coffee in afternoon shade, while an oud or a sax plays brings breath and relief every day. Another beginning, no useful conclusion in sight‚— another first draft that I tear out and add to the sheaf every day. One name, three-in-one, ninety-nine, or a matrix of tales that are one story only, well-springs of belief every day. But I wake before dawn to read news that arrived overnight on a minuscule screen , and exclaim  يا لطيف every day. Marilyn Hacker

I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught in some moorings. I am always tying up and then deciding to depart. In storms and at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide around my fathomless arms, I am unable to understand the forms of my vanity or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder in my hand and the sun sinking. To you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage of my will. The terrible channels where the wind drives me against the brown lips of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet I trust the sanity of my vessel; and if it sinks it may well be in answer to the reasoning of the eternal voices, the waves which have kept me from reaching you. Frank O’Hara

The words that rang around the sacrificial victims have flown: we'll never hear them, can't imagine the words for harvest weather, showers of hail: They're dead, along with words for man and woman. The sounds which they called their long boats — carved here with all their naked ribs exposed — we'll never hear: what milk was, or the sun's name, their love songs, words for senses, or the sound of eye, nose, mouth and ear. How did they sound? The summer words that lived in speech through winter and their words for snow; the word for autumn apples. We can't quite catch their name for weighty death: though here we see that word, we'll never hear it. Harry Martinsson tr. Andrew Brown

We shape our self to fit this world and by the world are shaped again. The visible and the invisible working together in common cause, to produce the miraculous. I am thinking of the way the intangible air passed at speed round a shaped wing easily holds our weight. So may we, in this life trust to those elements we have yet to see or imagine, and look for the true shape of our own self, by forming it well to the great intangibles about us. David Whyte

I. Clem Sanders, bystander It was late spring and silent, beach-grass switched like skirts of women walking past shop windows on their way to church, heads bent beside their husbands come up from orange groves just greening. I was distracted by a bird, which was no more than shoal-dust kicked up by wind. I missed her waving good-bye, saw only her back, her body bowing to enter the thing. II. Bo McNeeley, flight mechanic I go back there sometimes and think about things I could have done differently, little things, really, like looking at her when she spoke to me or giving her my jacket when she got cold. Things you would do for anyone. One time she said the body of a plane was like the belly of a horse. The whole bar cried Crazy bitch when I told them that. My dad used to come home dark from the mines and beat his day out of us. You couldn’t tell soot from bruises till you washed. Sometimes I dream of flying. Mostly it’s that she’s come back. We’...

What the heart, unsteady and ill, is supposed to do. And does: fly in missing-man formation, resettle too nearby, then scatter to confuse, fleeing like one who secretly wants catching. Hides to die. But doesn’t come to nothing: ends a block of bony, vesselled ice heaving, frostbit, in the chest. Dana Goodyear

Unexpectedly this October afternoon, the telescope turns, I see myself, made small again, through its objective lens: I am not the widower, who recently buried my wife, Nor the dutiful son who kept vigil while my father, Like a punch-drunk boxer, fought to out-fox death, Demented and enraged, hands trapped in cartoon gloves To stop him pulling out the tube to his morphine pump. Today we clear the house where he lived for sixty years. In the bedroom where I was born, my siblings recall How, as children, their only clue to my birth occurring Behind this closed door were anxious instructions to pray. When we open up the attic we discover the suitcase My mother packed for her last trip into hospital: A wash-bag and talc, clothes she never got to wear home, A purse crammed with prayers and the folded letter I wrote, as a ten-year-old, for my sister to bring into her. I spend one page telling her how good I'm being, then cram Three pages with scrawled Xs—each one to represent a kiss. Las...

Some people will be chosen for the job, the Wednesday night poker game for the limited number of spaces available in heaven. Only so many spoons fit in one drawer your mother would say and the same is true for clothes and closets shelves and cans and let's be honest hearts and loves. I cannot love you because I love another is a problem that sometimes gets admitted over wine in a restaurant filled with people choosing this dish over that meat choosing something that will fill the middle of their beings or leave them slavering like a cheetah who missed and pass that would you? and let's be friends. Yes let's drink to being friends and then we can all go on our way remembering the best part about being chosen is that you do not have to stop for anyone along the way. Betsy Johnson-Miller

We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.                        Gwendolyn Brooks

On balconies, sunlight. On poplars, sunlight on our lips. Today no one is shooting. A girl cuts her hair with imaginary scissors— the scissors in sunlight, her hair in sunlight. Another girl steals a pair of shoes from a sleeping soldier, skewered    with light. As soldier wakes and looks at us looking at them what do they see? Tonight they shot fifty women at Lerna St., I sit down to write and tell you what I know: a child learns the world by putting it in her mouth, a girl becomes a woman and a woman, earth. Body, they blame you for all things and they seek in the body what does not live in the body. Ilya Kaminski

 Poetry, I tell my students,  is idiosyncratic. Poetry  is where we are ourselves,  (though Sterling Brown said  “Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)  digging in the clam flats  for the shell that snaps,  emptying the proverbial pocketbook.  Poetry is what you find  in the dirt in the corner,  overhear on the bus, God  in the details, the only way  to get from here to there.  Poetry (and now my voice is rising)  is not all love, love, love,  and I’m sorry the dog died.  Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)  is the human voice,  and are we not of interest to each other? Elizabeth Alexander

In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make By loving others, but across most it sweeps, As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures.                          Philip Larkin   

Today my mind wanders to a time I was pet-sitting, to Valentine, a small, black cat who followed me all day through the house. A silent mass, she floated up and down the stairs after me as I did the chores—litter box, fresh water— and when I went to feed the dog, she continued to keep watch from the kitchen counter. The dog tapped out his rhythmic dance on the tiled flor. She sat still as if to say how much more there is to life than feeding, drinking, or walks around the block. When I reached out to stroke her, she withdrew just out of reach, her eyes wide open, fixed on my face. It snowed all of that day, and I cannot say why my heart hung heavy. After walking the dog, I fell asleep in the armchair watching television. I dreamed of falling. Common enough, you’d say, and yet, it seemed interminable, the aching to sound out the bottom, the shortness of breath. I opened my eyes in surprise to find Valentine on my chest, drawing her small breath, sending insistent, earthly tremors throug...

A scholar is just a library's way of making another library. Daniel Dennett

Methodical dust shades the combs and pomade while the wielded goodwill of the sunlight picks out a patch of paisley wallpaper to expand leisurely on it. The cape comes off with a matador's flourish and the scalp's washed to get rid of the chaff. This is the closeness casual once in the trenches and is deft as remembering when not to mention the troubles or women or prison. They talk of the parking or calving or missing. A beige lino, a red barber's chair, one ceramic brown sink and a scenic wall-calendar of the glories of Ulster sponsored by JB Crane Hire or some crowd flogging animal feed. About, say, every second month or so he will stroll and cross the widest street in Ireland and step beneath the bandaged pole. Eelmen, gunmen, the long dead, the police. And my angry and beautiful father: tilted, expectant and open as in a deckchair outside on the drive, persuaded to wait for a meteor shower, but with his eyes budded shut, his head full of lather and unusual thoughts. Ni...