a shandean commonplace book

The earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through. The earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat so we could die and live again. I wish the earth was     our mother So she'd be kind to us. I wish we were pictures on the rocks for our dreams to carry As mirrors. We saw the faces of those to be killed by the last of us in the last defense of the soul. We cried over their children's feast. We saw the faces of those who'll throw our children Out of the windows of the last space. Our star will hang up in mirrors. Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky? Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air? We will write our names with scarlet steam. We will cut off the head of the song to be finished by our flesh. We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree. Mahmoud Darwish

There we were, Penelope, my Border Collie mix, and I, one godless the other faithful, observing the fiery orange at the left side of the horizon, no bigger than my thumb, say, shy in profile, exhausting another of its ration of daybreaks, while off to the far right the ghostly white spider moon, dangling by its dreamy thread. That's when Lady P barked at the blind man measuring each step slowly emerging out of the shadows, a duel of balance and resolve. Indeed, miles from town, how had he gotten here? Head tilted toward the waves, as if listening to their instruction, his own intuition. That's when, out of the dunes, the deer came, a buck, doe and three yearlings, frozen in a jittery vigilance, the wonder of their long elegance turning to find us, Penelope, obeying my call of silence, bursting with an excitement the blind man sensed, turning toward them, their poise, their keenness, each of us suddenly an industry of looking, of not breathing, a tiny fragile presence, colliding

You know how it pretends to have a broken wing to lure predators away from its nest, how it staggers just out of reach . . . if, at this moment, you’re feeling metaphorical, nest can be the whatever inside us that we think needs protection, the whatever that is small & hasn’t yet found its way. Like us it has lived so long on scraps, on what others have left behind, it thinks it could live on air, on words, forever almost, it thinks it would be better to let the predator kill it than to turn its back on that child again, forgetting that one lives inside the other. Nick Flynn

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It's the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last. Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist. Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy. I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just co

When I was a weaver, I chose a red silk thread to get me to the heart of my creation and then back out, across the loom, to whatever life was waiting. And when you found the little red pathway, buried between warp and woof, you were sure you'd found a flaw. Please remember what happens when there's no exit. Years of breathing wool dust, reeking of lanolin, staring into coils of green yarn and blue—you go dumb. You've heard the story a thousand times— that trapped fox, whining and snuffling then biting her paw through the bone, and running off into the night. The mind wants this: a door in the wall,          an open field, a narrow path          through the woods, an open field Helen Wickes

we are not asked to see, the ridged folds of the black walnuts, fallen, come veined as any mind split from its skull, leaching what little parades as peace. Rot and wet. My right instep, sneaker's underneath, crushes a once greener skin gone brackish at the cap. Looking up, the branches meet in an arch you can walk under, pass through. And down the road, when I hear the patient father calling to his child stay away from the stick, I know he means street because of the cars and the highway in his head that's been riddled for months now with the tumors. The girl is seven. She's putting some of the still unbroken nuts in her plastic bag for her collage because the seeds inside are small and hard. I bring food to their porch, I say you are in my thoughts. A week ago when the wife asked, what's my name, he said, you are the woman. She says, It started with a pounding in the temple. Then the years' cells brewing fault, breaking bole from bark, furrows from solid trunk mak

Catchy but deliberately ambiguous. Self-effacing, coy, funny, funny, funny: poignant. Funny. Poignant, poignancy implying a general statement about the world and the way humans behave toward one another. General statement about the world. Slight redaction of that statement through irony, serving to undercut the broad statement while reinforcing a smaller, more incisive version of the truth it conveys. Funny and poignant and charming end which you then have to live like you believe. Robert Cantoni

You took away all the oceans and all the room. You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it. Where did it get you?  Nowhere. You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence. Osip Mandelstam

A parrot of irritation sits on my shoulder, pecks at my head, ruffling his feathers in my ear. He repeats everything I say, like a child trying to irritate the parent. Too much to do today: the dracena that's outgrown its pot, a mountain of bills to pay and nothing in the house to eat. Too many clothes need washing and the dog needs his shots. It just goes on and on, I say to myself, no one around, and catch myself saying it, a ball hit so straight to your glove you'd have to be blind not to catch it. And of course I hope it does go on and on forever, the little pain, the little pleasure, the sun a blood orange in the sky, the sky parrot blue and the day unfolding like a bird slowly spreading its wings, though I know, saying it, that it won't. Susan Wood

Don’t misunderstand me, I love a good poem Like half my Facebook friends, one that transports you To a corner of the soul you didn’t know was there Because you couldn’t find the precise metaphor, Even if you felt it, like that time my parents saw A local news story of an older woman asking for help With an ailing husband, and I volunteered to drive them To the address onscreen, a neighborhood I’d never driven through, though it looked familiar With its usual poverty: a few leaning boards called a house And inside the woman from the news in half-light Thanking us for the comforters in our hands and pointing To a foldout chair where we could place them Before introducing us to her husband, a scraggly beard Beneath a crinkled blanket on a cot right there In what would have been the living room, groaning In the muted manner of those who know this is As good as it’ll get, the woman’s non-stop small talk About “So it is, life’s a struggle” and “Please stay awhile” And “Take a seat,” as if we

It's so late I could cut my lights and drive the next fifty miles of empty interstate by starlight, flying along in a dream, countryside alive with shapes and shadows, but exit ramps lined with eighteen wheelers and truckers sleeping in their cabs make me consider pulling into a rest stop and closing my eyes. I've done it before, parking next to a family sleeping in a Chevy, mom and dad up front, three kids in the back, the windows slightly misted by the sleepers' breath. But instead of resting, I'd smoke a cigarette, play the radio low, and keep watch over the wayfarers in the car next to me, a strange paternal concern and compassion for their well being rising up inside me. This was before I had children of my own, and had felt the sharp edge of love and anxiety whenever I tiptoed into darkened rooms of sleep to study the small, peaceful faces of my beloved darlings. Now, the fatherly feelings are so strong the snoring truckers are lucky I'm not standing on the ru

I begin by a window, a lamp over my shoulder, and a glance outside to see if a light snow is falling or if it’s just the day’s floaters in an old man’s eyes. I check the clouds for signals and cuneiforms among the pillows, and the mountain ash for its resistance to autumn, and only then am I ready for the news, the artillery, the detonators, the beheadings, the bloodstains and marrow, the numbers, and the black hearts of the officials. I need the proof Peary sought in ice, and Odysseus at sea, to believe a fox, say, or a cougar can get away, and men and women also, so camouflaged in plain view that we see them only in the prepresentations, in the stories or briefly visible in the leaves or sky, escapees surviving by feel or ducked down in their thoughts, unable to speak freely. Marvin Bell

Late light, uneven mole-gnawed meadow, gullies, freshets, falls, whose start and speckle Hopkins would have loved — and you — you too, who loved the sheen and shade, the forest dapple where grass meets cypress just beyond the house — you’d praise the mushroom-sprout, the chilly glisten as the hedgerow folds into the solstice and suddenly the last crisp leaves unfasten. This time of year, this place, light dims at the pace of a long late afternoon walk, light seems to slow and sorrow as the meadow turns its face into your unlived season, the winter hollow where only a steep sky, in quarter inches, adjusts descending sun, ascending branches.       — In memory of E.L.G. Sandra Gilbert

Tonight they were bringing my brother up from the deep, nothing so grand as the sea, merely a quarry in Georgia, barely a mile or two wide and flooded to a depth of 200 feet, no bigger in the scheme of things than a soup spoon's bowl, but it held him, it cradled him, this place vast as death, small as life. It reduced him to a speck in the universe. The size of him, after all, was vast and small. It filled the spoon; it disappeared. Mary Stewart Hammond

We needed an alphabet to get our grid laid out. Then we tore grass from the site and found a pike-head, a spoon, a key with a hollow shank. Voices behind us chipped into the ground, our careful process of hunting, and then the ground became an entrance to a room of cryptic scale. The clays were tough but fill-soils gave with ease. We found a bridle bit and hand-wrought nails, a bell-metal blade with letters worn from its hilt. The cellar bulged inward. Walls tilted in places. With cautious hands we pulled grist from the past, turned space into negative space. We needed a new language to weigh each item: a pintle and fork, the lock of a snap-hance gun. The harder something was, the better chance we had of finding it, yet the dirt saved a glass pane and hoard of light, a written history of clouds. We set up lines and sifting trays, ate lunch beneath the plow zone. The chimney of stones had been salvaged for something, but a trench of ash remained. An Oak Tree sixpence fell from a wall an

After he died, my father made whole , I could see him next to my mother as she smoked on the couch, his face more alive than at Christmas, the last time I saw him, struggling to lift his cup. I knew beyond my body, now he’d died, he could show off a row of teeth, wry and silly, smiling again to score some irony in the situation. But the days I was home, he didn’t smile. My mother was in pain, he was her source, he grieved alongside her. And though he died the same day as my father, my student waited a week to show. At first, his back was all he’d allow, the twist and sweep of curls that were his character—another boy Apollo would have loved. He was shy about his neck. I said please, I needed to see where he’d been hurt. The purple pinched and dug at the base of his throat. He couldn’t say or breathe what happened but I saw deep in him the furious glimmer. Our dead return, wanting us to know there is no end.   Even suffering outlives this body. James Allen Hall

In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs      at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned: his forehead white with illumination— a lit bulb—the rest of his face in shadow,      darkened as if the artist meant to contrast his bright knowledge, its dark subtext. By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,      he was already linked to an affair with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems      to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out across the centuries, his lips fixed as if he's just uttered some final word.      The first time I saw the painting, I listened as my father explained the contradictions: how Jefferson hated slavery, though—out      of necessity, my father said—had to own slaves; that his moral philosophy meant he could not have fathered those children:      would have been impossible, my father said. For years we debated the distance between word and deed. I'd follow my father from book      to book, gathering citations, listen a