a shandean commonplace book

Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart. Head tells heart how it is, again:     You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday. Heart feels better, then. But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart. Heart is so new to this. I want them back, says heart. Head is all heart has. Help, head. Help heart. Lydia Davis

and I can't sleep so I'm up thinking too hard scribbling these words in the dark because the physics science news I read before bed is making me crazy now with incomprehension—it makes no sense to me that gravity should exist, what I know about is love: that flaring up of caring connection that lasts life-long and does not depend on distance, and it makes no sense to me that the speed of light in a vacuum should be a constant in this universe transforming at every instant along the way, speeding and slowing, and it makes no sense to me that there should have been an origin of the universe and before that nothing— surely it was everything, waiting there? When our lives are spun out of star furnaces and our histories of DNA mutable, shifting, remaking themselves in us—all that stuff of the universe spun out of nothing? It makes no sense, and it makes no sense that time should have a beginning and no end, for what was the constant face of love before time began and before matter a...

Pigeons fold their wings and fade into the gray facades of public places; flags descend from banks, silk slips floating to beds. Hips thrust like those of lovers, as workers crank through turnstiles, and waiting for the Ravenswood express at stations level with the sky, they shield their eyes with newspapers against a dying radiance; that lull between trains when stratified fire is balanced on a gleaming spire. Night doesn't fall, but rather, all the disregarded shadows of a day flock like blackbirds, and suddenly rise. Stuart Dybek

 The phlox in the jar is softening, from the sphere of it a blossom flutters, and the whole sagging thing makes me think of my mother’s flesh, when she was elderly, and it was wilting, keeping its prettiness in its old-fangled gentleness. It’s as if I’m falling in love, again, with my mother, through the gallowsglass of my own oncoming elderliness, as if, now that she has been gone from the earth as many years as a witch’s familiar has lives, I can catch glimpses of my mother, at moments when she was alone with herself, and would pick up her pen and Latinate vocabulary, and describe what it was like, on their last cruise, when she rose, by invitation, from the captain’s table, and stood behind the black, grand Steinway, in the open ocean, and sang. I do not need a picture to remind me of the look on my mom’s face, when she sang – extreme yearning, a yearning out at the edge of what was socially acceptable on a ship like that, and you could also see how happy her face was, to be loo...

Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he’s dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said. Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning Stevie Smith

 No wind. No storm. Just the trees heaving in their own sorrow. The girl next door who went missing a week ago Has come back; the faces of her parents stare Like bare, wounded hills beyond the river. Often a dream makes one afraid Of the things one might do. It frightens one That despair seems to have no boundaries. The laments for a death are over while death Is warm and safe and drifts into sleep In a child’s dream. Some time back I had stumbled On the decomposing bodies of a young couple On the hill slope behind the temple. The girl Couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. I had made a great effort to defend myself. Her half-open eyes now wander through My subdued Sunday mornings as though testing The courage it took to be a man. No wind. No storm. Just the vague light of daybreak Coming down from the hilltops. An unknown darkening is in my breath. And I knew death is born to us in the same way As when we cast our nets into the night And draw in the shapes of day. Jayanta...

Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more. Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know. Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord to keep it from fraying? Not the man who called my life a debacle, a word whose sound I love. In a debacle things are unleashed. Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary. I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate, the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing. They don’t use words, but they can be said to love. They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree. And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing stops them, it’s called inosculation : to unite by openings, to connect or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare , to provide with a mouth, from osculum , little mouth. Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among bi...

Though no one I had met believed it genuine, it gave me goosebumps. I was learning the flower passage, and my shift was ending, when the next guard caught me with my xerox reading on the job, aloud, how "daffadillies fill their cups with tears." I saw: he heard me. Pausing, pointing at me, he said, "Wait! 'To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.'" I didn't know the man, but thought his name was Craig, or Greg. Deliberate inflection counterpoised against the meter, closing his eyes, he said: "Weep no more, woeful Shepherds, weep no more, For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead," dead emphasized with feinted resolution---then, upon the upbeat: "Sunk though he be beneath the wat'ry floor," and with a leap in pitch: "So sinks the day-star in the Ocean bed, And yet anon repair his drooping head"---I can remember still the way he held that high note in the second syllable: "repairs his drooping head, And tricks his bea...

Everyone knows that the moon started out as a renegade fragment of the sun, a solar flare that fled that hellish furnace and congealed into a flat frozen pond suspended between the planets. But did you know that anger began as music, played too often and too loudly by drunken performers at weddings and garden parties? Or that turtles evolved from knuckles, ice from tears, and darkness from misunderstanding? As for the dominant thesis regarding the origin of love, I abstain from comment, nor will I allow myself to address the idea that dance began as a kiss, that happiness was an accidental import from Spain, that the ancient game of jump-the-fire gave rise to politics. But I will confess that I began as an astronomer—a liking for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things, a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit— and that my longing for you has not taken me very far from that original desire to inscribe a comet's orbit around the walls of our city, to gently strok...

My dearest dust, could not thy hasty day Afford thy drowsy patience leave to stay One hour longer: so that we might either Sit up, or gone to bed together? But since thy finished labour hath possessed Thy weary limbs with early rest, Enjoy it sweetly, and thy widow bride Shall soon repose her by thy slumbering side, Whose business now is only to prepare My nightly dress and call to prayer. Mine eyes wax heavy, and the day grows old, The dew falls thick, my blood grows cold, Draw, draw the closed curtains and make room, My dear, my dearest dust, I come, I come. Lady Catherine Dyer

 Now that the time remaining is insubstantial, I need to review my history while asking What exactly it suggests I've lived for, What pleasures or duties, what moods Of brief elation or extended calm. To expect a meaning deeper than that, To believe in a purpose beyond my own Furthered by me all along without my knowing, Is to warm myself at a fire painted on canvas. If I want the company of the nonexistent, I'm better off with the crowd of shadows who lost Their only chance to escape the darkness On the night I happened to be conceived. I wonder how many of them would have felt more lucky With the family allotted me than I did, more pleased With the neighborhood. So many chances for them To go out and investigate, in streets that often bored me, Rumors that the beautiful had been sighted locally. The sassafras tree in the lot behind the shoe store Might have been mentioned by some, Or the straight-backed, white-haired woman Waiting for the bus in the rain at Main and Biddle. E...

Hialeah, Florida in memory of my mother (1897–1974) The clocks are sorry, the clocks are very sad. One stops, one goes on striking the wrong hours. And the grass burns terribly in the sun, The grass turns yellow secretly at the roots. Now suddenly the yard chairs look empty, the sky looks empty, The sky looks vast and empty. Out on Red Road the traffic continues; everything continues. Nor does memory sleep; it goes on. Out spring the butterflies of recollection, And I think that for the first time I understand The beautiful ordinary light of this patio And even perhaps the dark rich earth of a heart. (The bedclothes, they say, had been pulled down. I will not describe it. I do not want to describe it. No, but the sheets were drenched and twisted. They were the very handkerchiefs of grief.) Let summer come now with its schoolboy trumpets and fountains. But the years are gone, the years are finally over. And there is only This long desolation of flower-bordered sidewalks That runs to th...

When you set out on your journey to Ithaka, pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge. The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops, the angry Poseidon—do not fear them: You will never find such as these on your path, if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine emotion touches your spirit and your body. The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops, the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter, if you do not carry them within your soul, if your soul does not set them up before you. Pray that the road is long. That the summer mornings are many, when, with such pleasure, with such joy, you will enter ports seen for the first time; stop at Phoenician markets, and purchase fine merchandise, mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony, and sensual perfumes of all kinds, as many sensual perfumes as you can; visit many Egyptian cities, to learn and learn from scholars. Always keep Ithaka in your mind. To arrive there is your ultimate goal. But do not hurry the voyage at all. It is better to let i...

It was a year in which sadness fulfilled the Socialist ideal and was given to everyone. Of little there is never shortage. The news featured our neighbors, as if agony lacked a local representative, and friends came over in all their casualty with pictures of sadness in billfolds beside their babes. Meanwhile our mothers tried sorrow on for size, like a casket, and I who might have had your new year's child, gave birth to blood. A hoard of emotion opened, gradual as shrapnel, the wall grieved down my thighs and still born in the drench -- after such sadness what resolution? -- the beginning. Christina Davis

           If many remedies are prescribed           for an illness, you may be certain           that the illness has no cure.           A. P. CHEKHOV           The Cherry Orchard 1     FROM THE NURSERY When I was born, you waited behind a pile of linen in the nursery, and when we were alone, you lay down on top of me, pressing the bile of desolation into every pore. And from that day on everything under the sun and moon made me sad — even the yellow wooden beads that slid and spun along a spindle on my crib. You taught me to exist without gratitude. You ruined my manners toward God: “We’re here simply to wait for death; the pleasures of earth are overrated.” I only appeared to belong to my mother, to live among blocks and cotton undershir...

 for Etta Silver (1913–2013) This is where the poem holds its breath, where the usable truth sways, sorrowing, and the people sway with the truth of it, and this is where the poem enters the dark. This is where the book closes and the clock opens and the clock closes and the book opens to song so the snow geese murmur and the coyote swaggers along the aspens. This is where the geese fly unabashedly out, and the sky turns white and wild with sound. This is where tumult, this is where prophecy. This is where the poem repents of language. This is where the poem enters silence, where the child holds the book in her lap whose pages are aflame with life, whose song sways with a usable truth, sorrowing. And this is where the poem holds its breath, and this is where the poem enters the dark. This is where it leaps wild about the child, where the snow geese seize the seamless sky and the universe splits open for one poem— the way a life lived calls on us to praise it. Maureen Seaton

From the guts of the house, I hear my mother crying for her mother and wish I understood the principles of tranquility. How to rest the mind on a likeness of a blast furnace framed in formica by anon. A photo of lounge chairs with folded tartan lap robes. An untitled typology of industrial parks. The gentle interface of yawn and nature. It would soothe us. It would soothe us. We would be soothed by that slow looking with a limited truth value. See how the realtor’s lens makes everything look larger and there’s so much glare the floor looks wow under the smartificial xmas tree. After studying Comparative Reality I began Die Polyvinylchloride Tannenbaumserie . Turn off that tiny tasteful star, I commanded. While you’re alive there’s no time for minor amazements. Turn off the sallow pages of your paralegal pad. I don’t need a light to think of you. I don’t need a god to pray. Some things are glow alone. I said one thing you said you remembered I said. Was it will you be my trophy friend? ...

Because it means looking into the sun, the people can barely see the two boys in the belltower or the two cables running from it to the ground. One boy crouches in a boat without oars, the other hangs from a harness in the next archway over, ready to jump. He doesn't have wings, but he is cherubic, picked for his wide eyes and smooth cheeks. As he falls he holds the bouquet the way he's been told to -- far out in front of him so it looks like a message from God. And in case the image isn't enough, there's the boy in the boat, tossing interpretation into the crowds. If the boat wobbles instead of gliding, it's because he has to get the last few pamphlets and poems out from under his feet. No gold unless the gondola is empty when he lands. He is lucky. It is windy and the words go far. Together their descents form two arms of a compass. Between them, as if they had drawn it, the piazza. Must it mean something if two boys who fall from the same spot land in opposite co...