a shandean commonplace book

1. We’ll say, late at night, or just before it is dawn: If only God knew how awful it is we’ll feel, surely, then, God wouldn’t make us suffer as horribly as this. Though, perhaps, after all, God doesn’t know the whole of our tale. Or perhaps, after all, God is powerless, too, or, perhaps, God is simply the God deep within us . . . Yes, so deep within us, God is what it is we’ll suffer, as well. 2. Brecht wrote, in old age, a little poem about happiness, which, he confessed, had eluded him all of his life. And so he stated wryly, if pitifully: It had better hurry up, at last, if happiness, you know, is ever to be mine, because, you see, so little time, of course, is left.     Robert Mazzocco

( i.m. I.H. ) The lately dead still arrive in the corner of your eye Past the restaurant window, preparing slow smiles of pride At achieving their return. They know that without them You can never be the same, so they cheat for a while. They keep trying to work a parole to the usual places, They won’t be excluded from them if you are there. Their fingers have pressed the latch and the door nearly opens, But then their smile turns embarrassed because they find It behaves like a turnstile: they think they have admission, But this door is fixed to prevent them coming back in. And you just can’t help, at all; if you went out to greet them They would not be there, no one in the street would have seen them. Then slowly the corner of your eye Forgets to look.       Alan Brownjohn

Some nights, I rise from the latest excuse for Why not stay awhile , usually that hour when the coyotes roam the streets as if they’ve always owned the place and had come back inspecting now for damage. But what hasn’t been damaged? History here means a history of storms rushing the trees for so long, their bowed shapes seem a kind of star— worth trusting, I mean, as in how the helmsman, steering home, knows what star to lean on. Do people, anymore, even say helmsman? Everything in waves, or at least wave-like, as when another’s suffering, being greater, displaces our own, or I understand it should, which is meant to be different, I’m sure of it, from that pleasure Lucretius speaks of, in witnessing from land a ship foundering at sea, though more and more it all seems related. I love the nights here. I love the jetty’s black ghost-finger, how it calms the harbor, how the fog hanging stranded just above the water is fog, finally, not the left- behind parts of those questions from which

You can only miss someone when they are present to you. The Isle of the Dead is both dark and light. Henry Miller told Anaïs Nin that the only real death is being dead      while alive. The absent will only be absent when they are forgotten. Until then, absence is a lie, an oxymoron. Therefore it is entirely unclear what absence means, or consists of. Sometimes I want to be famous once more, and then I think about      the paparazzi. I value my solitude. But I fear I am dead while alive. Forgetting is a kind of blessing: It would [          ]. To avoid living, worry about all you've forgotten. Then worry about what you will forget. I have lived long enough to want to do it over. When I miss my daughter, it's as a kind of idea. Then she comes to      me unexpectedly:           in her corduroy red parka, hair sticking out,           smiling at the geese, eating her shoelaces,           pointing, crying, More! When I saw the movie, in the dark c

       Why does this written doe bound through   these   written woods?                  —Wislawa Szymborska My handwriting is all over these woods. No, my handwriting is these woods, each tree a half-print, half-cursive scrawl, each loop a limb. My house is somewhere here, & I have scribbled myself inside it. What is home but a book we write, then read again & again, each time dog-earing different pages. In the morning I wake in time to pencil the sun high. How fragile it is, the world—I almost wrote the word but caught myself. Either one could be erased. In these written woods, branches smudge around me whenever I take a deep breath. Still, written fawns lie in the written sunlight that dapples their backs. What is home but a passage I’m writing & underlining every time I read it.   Maggie Smith