a shandean commonplace book

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today. Why isn't anything happening in the senate? Why do the senators sit there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What laws can the senators make now? Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting at the city's main gate on his throne, in state, wearing the crown? Because the barbarians are coming today and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader. He has even prepared a scroll to give him, replete with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don...

We didn't fall out of love, old love, we rose - we rose as in a plane, as in the moment when the wheels lift and the whole craft shudders against the gravity it then forgets as all at once the runway's fretful rushing by the window slows and resolves to field and tree line, the beaten metal of a pond the sun anneals; we rose the way it all grows clearer as it diminishes till a car drives in place along a road that winds and straightens, straightens to wind again across a widening landscape in which nothing at all is moving except the ever- smaller sharper shadow of our getting clear of it. Alan Shapiro

I have learned to accept the fact that we risk disappointment, disillusionment, even despair, every time we act. Every time we decide to believe the world can be better. Every time we decide to trust others to be as noble as we think they are. And that there might be years during which our grief is equal to, or even greater than, our hope. The alternative, however, not to act, and therefore to miss experiencing other people at their best, reaching toward their fullness, has never appealed to me.   Alice Walker

An unfamiliar woman sleeps on the other side of the bed. Her faint breathing is like a secret alive inside her. They had known each other three days in California four years ago. She was engaged and got married afterwards. Now the winter is taking down the last of the Massachusetts leaves. The two o’clock Boston & Maine goes by, calling out of the night like trombones rejoicing, leaving him in the silence after. She cried yesterday when they walked in the woods, but she didn’t want to talk about it. Her suffering will be explained, but she will be unknown nevertheless. Whatever happens, he will not find her. Despite the tumult and trespass they might achieve in the wilderness of their bodies and the voices of the heart clamoring, they will still be a mystery each to the other, and to themselves. Jack Gilbert

The music of the drill press is not music at all: steel into steel, then the abrupt crack of the bit and the stock flawed. Quit or start again. We’re talking 1951, the long summer that stretched into October before the autumn rains brought leaves cascading down from the oak— the only tree within miles— the one thing spring greened outside the loading dock of Leo’s Tool & Die as though to say,once and for all, Life thrives here, too! I heard the message and I heard wrong. Every hour dulled there, for every hour was the hour just passed and the one to come without rhythm or flavor. What I made was what I made the week before. We called it money, we measured the hours in dollars, all twenty-four operators grinding in time. Philip Levine

When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk, bought a ticket, ten minutes later they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors had said my father would not live through the night and the flight was cancelled. A young man with a dark brown moustache told me another airline had a nonstop leaving in seven minutes. See that elevator over there, well go down to the first floor, make a right, you'll see a yellow bus, get off at the second Pan Am terminal, I ran, I who have no sense of direction raced exactly where he'd told me, a fish slipping upstream deftly against the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those bags I had thrown everything into in five minutes, and ran, the bags wagged me from side to side as if to prove I was under the claims of the material, I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast, I who always go to the end of the line, I said Help me . He looked at my ticket, he said Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then run. I ...

I saw some shadows moving on the wall and heard a shuffle, as of wings or thoughts. I rolled back the sheets and looked at the day, a raw, blown day, white papers in the street. Sheets were flapping in the sky of my mind, I smelled the wet sheets, I tasted a day      in sheets hanging in the damp of a day. White pages flapping: my life had been so new when I didn't yet know how old it was. I couldn't see the vistas on those sheets, the dreamscapes sleeping deeply in those sheets; I hadn't yet seen my shadow vita or learned which host would trick me or treat me, which of my hosts would give me something sweet, some good counsel and a soft place to sleep, or what was the name of my ghostwriter. Who ghosted my life, whose dream would I ghost, who wrote my name and date across these sheets, and which sheets would be the wings of my thoughts, and which would hold the words of my angels. A host, and did I know I’d have a host; no, a line of sheets is never a bed, a gaggle of ho...

We woke to the darkness before our eyes, unable to take the measure of the loss. Who are they. What are we. What have we   abandoned to arrive with such violence at this hour. In answer we drew back, covered our ears with our hands to the heedless victory, or vowed,   as I did, into the changed air, never to consent. But it was already too late, too late for the unfarmed fields, the men by the station, the park swings, the parking lots,   the ground water, the doves—too late for dusk falling in summer, chains of glass lakes   mingled into dawn, the corals, the neighbors, the first drizzle on an empty street, cafeterias and stockyards, young men asking twice a day for   work. Too late for hope. Too far along to meet a country, a people, its annihilating need.   Because the year is new and the great change already underway, we concede a thousandfold   and feel, harder than the land itself, a complicity for everything we did not see or comprehend: cynicis...

Now let's all take a deep breath and start over. Hello, my name is mostly water. My name is I have never known a world other than this one. You too? Maybe you are also dismayed by our inability to quickly travel into space and were hoping by the time you grew up there would be something resembling a bullet train to the moon or even Mars. In the Fifties, they seemed so sure of the future's brightness, which may have been a side effect of having stared directly at the blast of the atomic bomb and believing perhaps foolishly but understandably that things could not get worse and so had to get better. It never works that way, does it? My parents are hunkered down in Florida waiting for the latest hurricane to do whatever it is going to do and there's another hurricane queued up behind it. You can believe that because you're alive and living is a procession of letdowns punctuated hopefully by pinnacles of good feeling. It never works that way, does it? Still, the water in yo...

One night I come back from the library late and there are all these floodlights on the Quai de Bourbon, where we live, and there is this big table with all these cookies on it and these big bottles of mineral water, so I ask somebody what's going on, and he tells me Roman Polanski is shooting a scene from a new movie of his called *The Ninth Gate*, so I hang around for a while and soon Roman Polanski shows up, and he has this big cigar in his face, and it sure doesn't look like a King Edward! But then I notice that there are these chocolate-covered graham crackers on the cookie table that look like the ones I used to love when I was a kid, and even though the cookies are obviously for the actors, I couldn't help sneaking one, and it turns out to be exactly the cookie I'm thinking of, and since by this time the actors have shown up and are rehearsing their scene and showing no interest whatsoever in the cookies, I take another and another, and soon I'm hog-facing tho...

What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain? But he has bought grief’s lottery, bought even the rain.   “Our glosses / wanting in this world”—“Can you remember?” Anyone!—“when we thought / the poets taught” even the rain?   After we died— That was it! —God left us in the dark. And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.   Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house. For mixers, my love, you’d poured—what?—even the rain.   Of this pear-shaped orange’s perfumed twist, I will say: Extract Vermouth from the bergamot, even the rain.   How did the Enemy love you—with earth? air? and fire? He held just one thing back till he got even: the rain.   This is God’s site for a new house of executions? You swear by the Bible, Despot, even the rain?   After the bones—those flowers—this was found in the urn: The lost river, ashes from the ghat, even the rain.   What was I to prophesy if not the end of the world? A salt pillar for the...

The rain is a broken piano, playing the same note over and over. My five-year-old said that. Already she knows loving the world means loving the wobbles you can’t shim, the creaks you can’t oil silent—the jerry-rigged parts, MacGyvered with twine and chewing gum. Let me love the cold rain’s plinking. Let me love the world the way I love my young son, not only when he cups my face in his sticky hands, but when, roughhousing, he accidentally splits my lip. Let me love the world like a mother. Let me be tender when it lets me down. Let me listen to the rain’s one note and hear a beginner’s song. Maggie Smith