a shandean commonplace book

O hefty hardcover on the built-in shelf in my parents’ living room, O authority stamped on linen paper, molted from your dust jacket, Questing Beast of blue and gold, you were my companion   on beige afternoons that came slanting through the curtains behind the rough upholstered chair. You knew how to trim a sail and how the hornet builds a hive. You had a topographical map   of the mountain ranges on the far side of the moon and could name the man who shot down the man who murdered Jesse James. At forty, I tell myself   that boyhood was all enchantment: hanging around the railway, getting plastered on cartoons; I see my best friend’s father marinating in a lawn chair, smiling benignly at his son and me   from above a gin and tonic, or sitting astride his roof with carpentry nails and hammer, going at some problem that kept resisting all his mending. O my tome, my paper brother,   my narrative without an ending, you had a diagram of a cow broken down into the ma...

Yes, I remember Adlestrop— The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June. The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. No one left and no one came On the bare platform. What I saw Was Adlestrop—only the name And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky. And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Edward Thomas

Whatever the Sunday, the sorrows kept the women in the kitchen, My cousins and their mothers, my grandmother, her sister, all of them Foraging through the nerves for pain. They sighed and rustled and one would Name her sorrows to cue sympathy's murmurs, the first offerings Of possible cures: three eggs for chills and fever, the benefits Of mint and pepper, boneset, sage, and crocus tea. Nothing they Needed came over-the-counter or through prescriptions not bearing A promise from God, who blessed the home remedies handed down From the lost villages of Germany for the aunt with dizzy spells, For the uncle with the steady pain of private swelling; for passed blood, For discharge and the sweet streak from the shoulder. In the pantry, Among pickled beets and stewed tomatoes, were dark, honeyed liquids, The vinegar and molasses sipped from tablespoons for sorrows So regular they spoke of them as laundry to be smoothed by the great iron Of faith which sets creases worthy of paradise. And ...

After death nothing is, and nothing, death: The utmost limit of a gasp of breath. Let the ambitious zealot lay aside His hopes of heaven, whose faith is but his pride; Let slavish souls lay by their fear, Nor be concerned which way nor where After this life they shall be hurled. Dead, we become the lumber of the world, And to that mass of matter shall be swept Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept. Devouring time swallows us whole; Impartial death confounds body and soul. For Hell and the foul fiend that rules God’s everlasting fiery jails (Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools), With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door, Are senseless stories, idle tales, Dreams, whimseys, and no more.    John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.                         Adrienne Rich

Like last August, after they’d finished my bone scan, this combed-over midsixties guy starts chatting about the novel he’s written in his head, he only needs someone like me to work it up, he never liked punctuation, parts of speech, all that junk from junior high, and I couldn’t get my printout fast enough to take to my GP, who likes to quote from his inspirational speeches to local luncheon clubs. He’s determined to collect them in a book, though he’d need a good editor, do I know any, and meanwhile I’ve been waiting fifty-seven minutes for help with recharging my sluggish thyroid, and I haven’t met any doctors who like giving free advice about your daughter’s milk allergy or your friend’s migraines or the thumb you slammed in the stairwell door, splitting it open so badly your students interrupted your lecture on pronoun agreement to note you were dripping blood from your hand and wow, what happened? But it’s mostly at parties I hate admitting I teach English. I’ve never been quick ...

Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now. Fred Rogers

Night. How the stars came down arching over us, and the only name we had for them was shooting stars . Why there were so many was anybody's guess. My great grandmother thought the world was coming to an end when Haley's comet flared across the sky. I lay flat on my back and watched the night sky falling all around me and I wanted, more than anything, never to go home. I did, of course. They put us campers into busses and drove us back to tenements, asphalt and streetlights in the city. What I didn't know that night in my bedroll at Sherwood Forest Camp was that when I got home, home wasn't my real home any more. I had a new home in my remembering and it was dark and safe and beautiful with shooting stars still falling all around. Pat Schneider

    for Thomas Fox Averill Pull over. Your car with its slow breathing. Somewhere outside Topeka it suddenly all matters again, those tractors blooming rust in the fields only need a good coat of paint. Red. You had to see for yourself, didn’t you; see that the world never turned small, transportation just got better; to learn we can’t say a town or a baseball team without breathing in a dead Indian. To discover why Coronado pushed up here, following the guide who said he knew fields of gold, north, who led them past these plains, past buffaloes dark as he was. Look. Nothing but the wheat, waving them sick, a sea. While they strangle him blue as the sky above you The Moor must also wonder when will all this ever be enough? this wide open they call discovery, disappointment, this place my thousand bones carry, now call home. Kevin Young

It had been long dark, though still an hour before supper-time. The boy stood at the window behind the curtain. The street under the black sky was bluish white with snow. Across the street, where the lot sloped to the pavement, boys and girls were going down on sleds. The boys were after him because he was a Jew.   At last his father and mother slept. He got up and dressed. In the hall he took out his sled and went out on tiptoe. No one was in the street. The slide was worn smooth and slippery--just right. He laid himself down on his sled and shot away. He went down only twice. He stood knee-deep in snow: no one was in the street, the windows were darkened; those near the street-lamps were ashine, but the rooms inside were dark; on the street were long shadows of clods of snow. He took his sled and went back into the house. Charles Reznikoff

At dusk the streetlights stand like beacons to the underworld, a girl runs toward me beaded with rain and sweat. I think husk , wheels — seeds rattle, shake loose and a candle is held to the egg's red mass she is too young to see. In Pompeii those bodies are not bodies but plaster poured into the cavity where a body once lay, no less a hand pushing back ash, no less a woman with her unborn child twisting for a pocket of air, the forge, the fire, the glimpsed blade, a door we close quickly, just as my brother said Now I know I will die , and I thought of course and not me in the same second. We kept driving, arrived at the airport and the next day our father did die— aria , the birds rising at the sound of the explosion and plums , succulent ashy, burnished. Walking down the Spanish Steps on a Sunday morning in October, no one there yet, Keats' window open, you said Ten or fifteen years from now when I am gone, come back . You touched our absence from each other, the fifteen yea...

On a day of windy transition, one season to the next, you spoke of helping your mother close her house, of the choices you had to make—what to discard, what to keep—as if it were your childhood itself waiting to be plundered. You kept a Persian rug, all reds and golds, to walk on every day, keeping the past alive under your feet; those nested Russian dolls you played with as a girl: grandmother, mother, daughter; four bentwood chairs wrenched now from their table. I listened, thinking I'd be next to try to crowd a lifetime of things into a shrinking universe of boxes. I've started to dismantle my life already, throwing out letters from people I remember loving, choosing among books—this one to stay, that one to go—as if I were a judge sentencing some to death, the rest to the purgatory of the emptying shelf. Perhaps I should simply burn it all. But don't we live on in what we've left behind? In the fading twilight of Kodak? In our silver knives and spoons tarnishing on ...

It is a summer afternoon in October. I am sitting on a wooden bench, looking out At the lake through a tall screen of evergreens, Or rather, looking out across the plane of the lake, Seeing the light shaking upon the water As if it were a shimmering of heat. Yesterday, when I sat here, it was the same, The same displaced out-of-season effect. Seen twice it seemed a truth was being told. Some of the trees I can see across the lake Have begun to change, but it is as if the air Had entirely given itself over to summer, With the intention of denying its own proper nature. There is a breeze perfectly steady and persistent Blowing in toward shore from the other side Or from the world beyond the other side. The mild sound of the little tapping waves The breeze has caused—there’s something infantile About it, a baby at the breast. The light Is moving and not moving upon the water. The breeze picks up slightly but still steadily, The increase in the breeze becomes the mild Dominant event, compe...

In unfolded aluminium chairs the color of shit     and set in a circle as if to corral some emptiness         in this church basement deep in the dirt,             strangers sit and tell stories. Sergei sipped wine in a hot tub. Janice     threw back shots in a dive.         Bob drew blinds to smoke blunts and ate nothing             but cake frosting bought by the case. The first lady of someplace swiped her son’s meds     to stay slim. Craig burst through bank doors,         machine gun in hand. John geezed heroin:             with a turkey baster , he says, into a neck vein . A cop shoved Mark’s face in the mud,     put a shoe on his neck to cuff him and ask         where hi...

You sit at a window and listen to your father crossing the dark grasses of the fields toward you, a moon soaking through his shoes as he shuffles the wind aside, the night in his hands like an empty bridle. How long have we been this way, you ask him. It must be ages, the wind answers. It must be the music of the wind turning your fingers to glass, turning the furniture of childhood to the colors of horses, turning them away. Your father is still crossing the acres, a light on his tongue like a small coin from an empire that has always been ruined. Now the dark flocks are drifting through his shoulders with an odor of lavender, an odor of gold. Now he has turned as though to go, but only knelt down with the heavy oars of October on his forearms, to begin the horrible rowing. You sit in a chair in the room. The wind lies open on your lap like the score of a life you did not measure. You rise. You turn back to the room and repeat what you know: The earth is not a home. The night is not a...

She gathered up our photographs of you and one by one cut away the high trees above your head, sliced through chair legs and discarded all the sky. You're intact, assembled in a frame beside her bed. You in thin air. You somewhere. She can't even name the town or room you're in. She couldn't care less but I've spent ages searching the bin for scraps of garden and the old settee, to put them back around you, to leave you in a place you'll know with half a chance to see the light on in the yard, the kitchen door still open for you, wider than before. Amanda Dalton

I met with no one on the long way home The evenings grow cold and stretch far ahead Come comfort me a little for I am tired now And suddenly so dreadfully alone. I never saw before that the darkness is so vast, I walk and think of all those things I ought There are so many things I should have said and done And there’s so very little that I did Hurry, beloved; hurry to love The days are darker for every minute Light our candles; night is close: The flowering summer soon will be gone I’m looking for something perhaps we’ve forgotten which you might help me to find One summer passes, and it’s always just as brief It’s the dream of what we could have gained. Perhaps you will come some time before the dusk grows blue before the meadows are dry and empty Perhaps we’ll find each other perhaps we’ll find then a way to make everything flower Hurry, beloved; hurry to love The days are darker for every minute Light our candles; night is close: The flowering summer soon will be gone The storm out...

The poverty of having everything is not wanting anything: I trudge down the mall halls and see nothing wanting which would pick me up: I stop at a cheap $79 piece of jewelry, a little necklace dangler, and it has a diamond chip in it hardly big enough to sparkle, but it sparkles: a piece of junk, symbolically vast; imagine, a life with a little sparkle in it, a little sparkle like wanting something, like wanting a little piece of shining, maybe the world's smallest ruby: but if you have everything the big carats are merely heavy with price and somebody, maybe, trying to take you over: the dull game of the comers–on, waiting everywhere like moray eels poked out of holes: what did Christ say, sell everything and give to the poor, and immediacy enters; daily bread is the freshest kind: dates, even, laid up old in larders, are they sweet: come off sheets of the golden desert, knees weak and mouth dry, what would you think of an oasis, a handful of dates, and a clear spring breaking out...

Now is the time of year when bees are wild and eccentric. They fly fast and in cramped loop-de-loops, dive-bomb clusters of conversants in the bright, late-September out-of-doors. I have found their dried husks in my clothes. They are dervishes because they are dying, one last sting, a warm place to squeeze a drop of venom or of honey. After the stroke we thought would be her last my grandmother came back, reared back and slapped a nurse across the face. Then she stood up, walked outside, and lay down in the snow. Two years later there is no other way to say, we are waiting. She is silent, light as an empty hive, and she is breathing. Elizabeth Alexander

To the futile sound of midnight church bells, out back someone is rinsing her thoughts in unfathomable universal sky— a cold faint glowing. As always stars are white as salt on the blade of an old axe. The rain-barrel’s full, there’s ice in its mouth. Smash the ice—comets and stars melt away like salt, the water darkens and the earth on which the barrel stands is transparent underfoot, and there too are galaxies, ghost-pale and roaring silently in the seven-hundred-odd chambers of the mind. Reginald Gibbons

Generally, there are two problems With money: 1. Getting it and 2. What To do with it. Certainly the food bank Needs your help. The bristled ant. Girls’ volleyball and these days even The water supply, even the sky. As you may surmise by my raiment, Drapings really, and the primitive Medium of this message, I have little To recommend re: 1. Whereas 2.: Start small. Make a stack of quarters Then knock them down like an affordable Coup d’état. Pennies are mostly zinc So there’s your source of zinc, An excellent sunblock. If you crumple A crisp, uncirculated bill then Uncrumple it incompletely, It’ll appear to have shrunk as vivid Visual aid to the recession. Blame The president. Blame Congress. Blame Mexico. For dramatic effect Abbie Hoffman dropped a few hundred ones On the New York Stock Exchange floor, The ensuing pandemonium shutting down The world economy for a couple hours. Vermeer-owning industrialists Stared into the nothing-mist. Oil Magnates and hotel highnesses stared Into the...

"Take it," my grandmother said. "You     might as well have it now." "No," I said, knowing what now meant.     But I took it anyway, when I left, leaving a white space--     a window where the picture went. I brought it home and hung it up:     my grandmother, young, reading under some trees. Red dress and shoes,     the same rooster red used, for effect, on a rooftop skirting     a broad, heavy sky of news- paper gray, her wide book a pair     of white goose wings, shedding light on her face. What is happening     in those pages? She doesn't look up, there's no hint of the artist,     my grandfather, dampening his brushes a few yards away,     about as far as I sit from her now, although to me,     at this distance, she's a good deal smaller--a painted figure     in a painting. A tree is a waterspout, a peake...