a shandean commonplace book

In order to improve, our definition of what it means to be human must include recognising the horrors we are capable of in societies of past and present. The systematic oppression of others and the massacre of billions of animals were done by human beings. Us. We can become better only if we realise that besides all the wonders, this is us too and it can happen again if we don’t change the ways we live together.   from The Passenger Pigeon Manifesto

IV. Quarantine In the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people a man set out from the workhouse with his wife. He was walking - they were both walking - north. She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up. He lifted her and put her on his back. He walked like that west and west and north. Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived. In the morning they were both found dead. Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history. But her feet were held against his breastbone. The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her. Let no love poem ever come to this threshold. There is no place here for the inexact praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body. There is only time for this merciless inventory: Their death together in the winter of 1847. Also what they suffered. How they lived. And what there is between a man and woman. And in which darkness it can best be proved. Eavan Boland

Does she love you? She says yes, but really how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion, undoing its petals and laminae, and going in below all trace of consciousness, into the neuroelectrical coffer where self-understanding is storaged away, and then lifting its uttermost molecule out, to study in its nakedness as it spins in a clinical light?—the way we all, in our various individual versions of this common human urge, go in, and in, and in, the physicist down to the string-vibration underlying matter, and the Appalachia fiddler getting so (as she puts it) "into my music," sound becomes a flesh for her to intimately ("in"-timately) enter, "its thick and its sweetbreads." Is he cheating on you? He says no, and feigns that he's insulted, but for certainty you'll need to delicately strip the bark away and drill, and tweeze, until you can smear a microscope slide of the pith and can augur the chitterlings —the way the philosopher can

 Rain tomorrow, but tonight the sky is clear, the stars shine. Still, the rain’s coming, maybe enough to drown the seeds. There’s a wind from the sea pushing the clouds; before you see them, you feel the wind. Better look at the fields now, see how they look before they’re flooded. A full moon.  Yesterday a sheep escaped into the woods, and not just any sheep—the ram, the whole future. If we see him again, we’ll see his bones. The grass shudders a little; maybe the wind passed through it.   And the new leaves of the olives shudder in the same way. Mice in the fields.  Where the fox hunts, tomorrow there’ll be blood in the grass. But the storm—the storm will wash it away. In one window, there’s a boy sitting. He’s been sent to bed—too early, in his opinion.  So he sits at the window— Everything is settled now. Where you are now is where you’ll sleep, where you’ll wake up in the morning. The mountain stands like a beacon, to remind the night that the earth exists, that it mustn’t be forg

 Exile in my own home, I walk through A lattice of shadows in the hushed rooms. No one speaks, but in that emptiness I sometimes hear The sticky vernacular of the real. The scents that used to wisp around me when she passed, After a bath or before an evening out, are stoppered now, Butterflies gone back to their spent cocoons. Nothing relents: I deal with damages In the downspouts, the drainpipes, the kitchen sink. One more hard storm and they'll be drilling Weepholes in the basement walls. I've had so many years To perfect failure, by alibis or neglect— As now, opening the refrigerator, I find Blue milk, black fruit, and something in that jar Strange enough to make a monkey jump. So much undone, or never done, or holding for a moment only, Like water braiding itself in a schooner's wake. But why complain? This is my house. This is my cold hand on the doorknob. Elton Glaser

 It's the Fourth of July, the flags are painting the town, the plastic forks and knives are laid out like a parade. And I'm grilling, I've got my apron, I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish, I've got a hat shaped like the state of Pennsylvania. I ask my father what's his pleasure and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare," and then, "Hamburger, sure, what's the big difference," as if he's really asking. I put on hamburgers *and* hot dogs, slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas, uncap the condiments. The paper napkins are fluttering away like lost messages. "You're running around," my mother says, "like a chicken with its head loose." "Ma," I say, "you mean *cut off*, *loose* and *cut off* being as far apart as, say, *son* and *daughter*." She gives me a quizzical look as though I've been caught in some impropriety. "I love you and your sister just the same," she says, "Sure,&q

There is menace in its relentless course, round and round, describing an ellipsoid, an airy prison in which a young girl is incarcerated. Whom will she marry? Whom will she love? The rope, like a snake, has the gift of divination, yet reveals only a hint, a single initial. But what if she never misses? Is competence its own reward? Will the rope never strike her ankle, love's bite? The enders turn and turn, two-handed as their arms tire, their enchantments exhausted. It hurts to watch her now, flushed and scowling, her will stronger than her limbs, her braids lashing her shoulders with each small success. Connie Wanek