a shandean commonplace book

Constantly risking absurdity                           and death        whenever he performs                           above the heads                                       of his audience   the poet like an acrobat                   climbs on rime                           to a high wire of his own making  and balancing on eyebeams                       above a sea of faces            paces his way                         to the other side of day   performing entrechats                      and slight-of-foot tricks   and other high theatrics                     and all without mistaking              any thing                        for what it may not be    For he's the super realist                           who must perforce perceive              taut truth                     before the taking of each stance or step  in his supposed advance                     toward that still higher perch where Beauty stands and waits                     with gravity                        

The whales can’t hear each other calling in the noise-cluttered sea: they beach themselves. I saw one once— heaved onto the sand with kelp stuck to its blue-gray skin. Heavy and immobile   it lay like a great sadness. And it was hard to breathe with all the stink. Its elliptical black eyes had stilled, were mostly dry, and barnacles clustered on its back like tiny brown volcanoes.   Imagining the other whales, their roving weight, their blue-black webbing of the deep, I stopped knowing how to measure my own grief. And this one, large and dead on the sand with its unimaginable five-hundred-pound heart. Sally Bliumis-Dunn

What is a wound but a flower dying on its descent to the earth, bag of scent filled with war, forest, torches, some trouble that befell now over and done. A wound is a fire sinking into itself. The tinder serves only so long, the log holds on and still it gives up, collapses into its bed of ashes and sand. I burned my hand cooking over a low flame, that flame now alive under my skin, the smell not unpleasant, the wound beautiful as a full-blown peony. Say goodbye to disaster. Shake hands with the unknown, what becomes of us once we’ve been torn apart and returned to our future, naked and small, sewn back together scar by scar. Dorianne Laux

In Ovid, where the birds are manifestations of our grief, we watch the tyrant Tereus who has just supped on the flesh of his own son, transformed by loss and desire for revenge into a stiff-crested hoopoe with a pronged beak to replace his sword. We watch Ino's distraught servant girls assume the shapes of shearwaters as they follow their mistress over Juno's cliffs, and poor Cygnus, his love forever undeclared, turned to a swan as he laments the sudden death of Phaeton. We watch, thinking past the allegory, knowing no heron springs up from our empathy when we see, through the windscreen, a car pushed to the side of the highway where shattered glass shines like a recent shower of rain and a state trooper stoops to lay down his orange flames as the traffic slows and weaves its way round him. Or at least that's what I've come to think up here, winged with so many others in this approximate manner somewhere between Saint Johns and the Blaskets, spine of this book open acro

       Wallace Stevens is beyond fathoming, he is so strange; it is as if he had a morbid secret he would rather perish than disclose . . .         —Marianne Moore to William Carlos Williams Another day, which is usually how they come: A cat at the foot of the bed, noncommittal In its blankness of mind, with the morning light Slowly filling the room, and fragmentary Memories of last night's video and phone calls. It is a feeling of sufficiency, one menaced By the fear of some vague lack, of a simplicity Of self, a self without a soul, the nagging fear Of being someone to whom nothing ever happens. Thus the fantasy of the narrative behind the story, Of the half-concealed life that lies beneath The ordinary one, made up of ordinary mornings More alike in how they feel than what they say. They seem like luxuries of consciousness, Like second thoughts that complicate the time One simply wastes. And why not? Mere being Is supposed to be enough, without the intricate Evasions of a myster

At Robben Island the political prisoners studied. They coined the motto Each one Teach one. In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners Address them always as "Profesor." Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say. Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination That calls the boiled sheep heads in the market "Smileys." The first year at Guantanamo, Abdul Rahim Dost Incised his Pashto poems into styrofoam cups. "The Sangomo says in our Zulu culture we do not Worship our ancestors: we consult them." Becky is abandoned in 1902 and Rose dies giving Birth in 1924 and Sylvia falls in 1951. Still falling still dying still abandoned in 2006 Still nothing finished among the descendants. I support the War, says the comic, it's just the Troops I'm against: can't stand those Young People. Proud of the fallen, proud of her son the bomber. Ashamed of the government. Skeptical. After the Klansman was found N

    His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow ; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.                     George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

Awful, not to be sleeping in the same bed with you. The respectability of medical opinion, that destroys not just hope, but the actual network of pleasure we built in life. Never again, the sane encounter- and the undercover hint of form, the plasticity of companionship that nobody mentions. Nightly conjunctions, part dreams, the ceiling blink of cars from outside on the country road. The low scatter, and grace-pattering rain, color of consciousness. That we are more than individuals. And now rent, kept apart, not by warring theatrical families, but by doctors and syringes. In their distant birdcage, taking account. Ravenously, I look forward to even the skimpiest meeting allowed, and our unrealistic true love. Unfettered and determined like headlights on a road. Jane Mayhall