a shandean commonplace book

 So it was with the suitcase left in front of the hotel — cinched, broken-locked, papered with world ports, carrying what mattered until then, when turning your back to cup a match it was taken, and the thief, expecting valuables instead found books written between wars, gold attic-light, mechanical birds singing and the chronicle of your country’s final hours. What, by means of notes, you hoped to become: a noun on paper, paper dark with nouns: swallows darting through a basilica, your hands up in smoke, a cloud about to open over the city, pillows breathing shallowly where you had lain, a ghost in a hospital gown, and here your voice, principled, tender, soughing through a fence woven with pine boughs: Writing is older than glass but younger than music, older than clocks or porcelain but younger than rope. Dear one, who even in speaking is silent, for years I have searched, usually while asleep, when I have found the suitcase open, collecting snow, still holding your vade mecum of th

What are we now but voices who promise each other a life neither one can deliever not for lack of wanting but wanting can’t make it so. We hang from a vine at the cliff’s edge. There are tigers above and below. Let us love one another and let go. Eliza Griswold

The night before my father died I dreamed he was back home, and I in my old room on the third floor, and he was calling up to me from the bottom of the stairs some advice I couldn’t hear or recall the next day when, standing over him back in the ICU full of the chirping of machines we had decided to unplug, I remembered the dream and heard him call my name. Jeffrey Harrison

 Today lasted so long, by the time I arrived at nightfall, I had forgotten that this morning was this morning. It seemed so far away, like yesterday, or the day before. And days and days and days unfolded in the hours between when first I woke and when now I sit. I notice minutes move, much more than when I was younger. Today I looked at my face in a mirror. I braided my hair. I put on a dress. Today a child shook my hand like a grown-up and told me she was in the sixth grade. It sounded like she said she wasn’t the sick grey which made me think that is what she thought I was. I am watching parts of me evaporate like sidewalk water. This wet grey, this nighttime dew, gone before morning Sarah Kay

 A horse hair falls into the water and grows into an eel.     Even Aristotle believed that frogs                 formed from mud, that mice sprouted like seedlings in the damp hay.     I used to believe the world spoke             in code. I lay awake and tried to parse the flashes of the streetlight—     obscured, revealed,         obscured by the wind-sprung tree. Stranded with you at the Ferris wheel's apogee     I learned the physics         of desire—fixed at the center, it spins and goes nowhere.     Pliny described eight-foot lobsters             sunning themselves on the banks of the Ganges. The cuckoo devouring     its foster mother. Bees alighting             on Plato's young lips. In the Andes, a lake disappears overnight, sucked     through cracks in the earth.             How can I explain the sunlight stippling your face in the early morning? Why not believe that the eye throws its own light,     that seeing illuminates         the world?             On the moon,

 I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.” Danusha Lameris

      What to do with this knowledge that     living is not guaranteed? Perhaps one day you touch the young branch of something beautify. & it grows & grows despite your birthdays & the death certificate, & it one day shades the heads of something     beautiful or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out of your house, then, believing in this. Nothing else matters. All above us is the touching of strangers & parrots, some of them human, some of them not human. Listen to me. I am telling you a true thing. This is the only kingdom. The kingdom of touching; the touches of the disappearing, things. Aracelis Girmay

 People always tell me, “Don’t put the cart before the horse,” which is curious because I don’t have a horse. Is this some new advancement in public shaming— repeatedly drawing one’s attention to that which one is currently not, and never has been, in possession of? If ever, I happen to obtain a Clydesdale, then I’ll align, absolutely, it to its proper position in relation to the cart, but I can’t do that because all I have is the cart. One solitary cart—a little grief wagon that goes precisely nowhere—along with, apparently, one invisible horse, which does not pull, does not haul, does not in any fashion budge, impel or tow my disaster buggy up the hill or down the road. I’m not asking for much.  A more tender world with less hatred strutting the streets. Perhaps a downtick in state-sanctioned violence against civilians.  Wind through the trees. Water under the bridge. Kindness. LOL, says the world. These things take time, says the Office of Disappointment. Change cannot be rushed, sa

 For Connie Fox and William King Everyone arrives later than everyone else, taller than expected, the gossip anthropological in nature, turning clockwise. Stubborn, the art doesn't seem to mind being the center of its own attention. Death remains in fashion, while delight appears to be making a comeback. Art, the conversation claims, is: "an assault on time," "a currency of doubt and opportunity," "a cease-fire with calamity." Uninvited, it keeps on coming, its mouth filled with intuition, such lovely feathers. Ah, the white fluorescent walls, the landscapes grateful to have survived their own stillness. Everyone seems to want something, dogma, truth, a context, politics is not out of the question, but passion twists the ephemeral into perception, urges the phenomenal to confront the merely mysterious. You know what I mean—all that endless standing, stepping back, squinting, sighing, doing and undoing, the middle torn out of its own beginning, the plea

In the photo there's a child astride your shoulders. You are moving through the cut-gold of a field. The hedgerow trees are thickening and darkening. The sky's a constant, clear, heraldic blue. You are on the right side, walking slowly. The left side of the meadow's deep and still. I've cut it down the middle, framed and hung it. We pass you every time we climb the stairs. Which leaves the empty half for me to deal with: the empty field, the hedgerow trees, the sky. I've framed that, too, I keep it on the shelf above my desk, slipped in between two books. I tell myself you're everywhere around me. That summer is still sumptuous, people die. These are the separated halves of the same picture. Kerry Hardie

Lights are burning In quiet rooms Where lives go on Resembling ours. The quiet lives That follow us — These lives we lead But do not own — Stand in the rain So quietly When we are gone, So quietly . . . And the last bus Comes letting dark Umbrellas out — Black flowers, black flowers. And lives go on. And lives go on Like sudden lights At street corners Or like the lights In quiet rooms Left on for hours, Burning, burning. Donald Justice

The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his first rotation in the emergency room. On the ancient boarding-school radio, in the attic hall, the announcer had given my boyfriend’s name as one of two brought to the hospital after the sunrise service, the egg hunt, the crash—one of them critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the stairwell bannisters, at their lathing, the necks and knobs like joints and bones, the varnish here thicker here thinner—I had said Which one of them died , and now the world was an ant’s world, the huge crumb of each second to be thrown, somehow, up onto my back—and the young, tired voice said my fresh love’s name. It would have been nice to tear out the balusters, and rail, and the stairs, like a big backbone out of a mastodon, to take some action, to do, and do, and do, as a done-to, and dear one to a done-to-death-to—to run, on a treadmill, all night, and light the dorm, the entire school, with my hate of fate, and blow its wiring, and the town’s wiri

It’s a cold Sunday February morning and I’m one of eight men waiting for the doors of Toys R Us to open in a mall on the eastern tip of Long Island. We’ve come for the Japanese electronic game that’s so hard to find. Last week, I waited three hours for a store in Manhattan to disappoint me. The first today, bundled in six layers, I stood shivering in the dawn light reading the new Aeneid translation, which I hid when the others came, stamping boots and rubbing gloveless hands, joking about sacrificing sleep for ungrateful sons. “My boy broke two front teeth playing hockey,” a man wearing shorts laughs. “This is his reward.”  My sons will leap into my arms, remember this morning all their lives. “The game is for my oldest boy, just back from Iraq,” a man in overalls says from the back of the line. “He plays these games in his room all day. I’m not worried, he’ll snap out of it, he’s earned his rest.”  These men fix leaks, lay foundations for other men’s dreams without complaint. They’ve