a shandean commonplace book

Sometimes things don’t go, after all, from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail, sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well. A people sometimes will step back from war; elect an honest man; decide they care enough, that they can’t leave some stranger poor. Some men become what they were born for. Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to. The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you. Sheenagh Pugh

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —  over and over announcing your place in the family of things. Mary Oliver

A  Nocturnal Reverie In   such a Night , when every louder Wind Is to its distant Cavern safe confin'd ; And only gentle Zephyr fans his Wings , And lonely Philomel , still waking , sings ; Or from some Tree , fam'd for the Owl's delight , She , hollowing clear , directs the Wand'rer right : In such a Night , when passing Clouds give place , Or thinly vail the Heav'ns mysterious Face ; When in some River , overhung with Green , The waving Moon and trembling Leaves are seen ; When freshen'd Grass now bears it self upright , And makes cool Banks to pleasing Rest invite , Whence springs the Woodbind , and the Bramble-Rose , And where the sleepy Cowslip shelter'd grows ; Whilst now a paler Hue the Foxglove takes , Yet checquers still with Red the dusky brakes : When scatter'd Glow-worms , but in Twilight fine , Shew trivial Beauti...

 The tanks from the Past rolled in this morning. Our neighbors crowded the curbs to cheer though only yesterday, they were snitching: A has prior tendencies, B has backward dreams ... Already the old flag flies over the armory, the cathedral, the courthouse, Mercy, Parliament, Beaux Arts, a kindergarten. Already we tell ourselves, "The Past rules, but if we hold our breath we'll emerge safe in the present, vindicated, knowing we're steadfast, we passed the test of our lives." Troops file by, numberless as ears of wheat, gray with ash, so tired they give off light, eyes locked, forward, forward , never a glance for our linden-shaded side streets; and we watch, we force ourselves to peek, or not peek, we part the curtain a hand's breadth, a thumbnail. At nightfall, gunshots in a distant suburb, dry, faint, adamant as a cat's cough. For every twelve firing squad volunteers, rumor claims, one is issued blank ammo: so even in the Past, there must be shame. Nothing ...

Even when you know what people are capable of, even when you pride yourself on knowing, on not evading history, or the news, or any of the quotidian, minor, but still endlessly apparent and relevant examples of human cruelty—even now there are times it strikes you anew, as though you’d spend your whole life believing that humanity was fundamentally good, as though you’d never thought, like Schopenhauer, that it was all blind, impersonal will, never chanted perversely, almost gleefully, the clear-sighted adjectives learned from Hobbes— solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short — even now you’re sometimes stunned to hear of some terrible act that sends you reeling off, too overwhelmed  even to weep, and then you realize that your innocence,  which you had thought no longer existed, did, in fact, exist—that somewhere underneath your cynicism you still held out hope. But that hope has been shattered now,  irreparably, or so it seems, and you have to go on, afraid that there is...

There is a kind of love called maintenance, Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;  Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;  Which answers letters; which knows the way The money goes; which deals with dentists  And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains, And postcards to the lonely; which upholds  The permanently ricketty elaborate Structures of living; which is Atlas.  And maintenance is the sensible side of love, Which knows what time and weather are doing To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring; Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps My suspect edifice upright in air, As Atlas did the sky. UA Fanthorpe

We have been telling the story wrong all along, how a king took Philomela's tongue after he had taken her body, and how the gods turned her into a nightingale so she could tell the night of her grief. Even now the streets wait for her lamentation—strays minister to bones abandoned on a stoop, a man sleeps on the ghosts of yesterday's heat, pigeons rest on top of the church and will not stir until they hear music below them. Inside, a woman warms up the organ and sings Via Dolorosa about a Messiah who wanted to save everyone from the wages of pleasure. But how can I keep a man's fingers from my mouth? How can I resist bare trees dervishing on the sidewalk? A woman outside the train station asks, Is there a city underneath this city? I say, Let me tell you a story, and tell her that after Longfellow put out the fire in his wife's dress, after he buried her, after his burns turned to soft pink skin, he translated the Inferno. There is a place deep in the earth for the ravi...

Years before ever seeing California, I wrote a story titled “Oakland in Rain.” Rain served as an easy metaphor for the unexpected in a place known for abundance, and it provided a texture of melancholy. The nameless protagonist—an exiled drunk who was, of course, a thinly veiled version of myself— had lost her mind and believed the weather communicated with her: rain meant soberness, that she had been absolved of some sort of punishment. Plagued by her wild inner life, I imagined her wandering the city, intent on getting lost in the Catholic cemeteries, where she took note   of lemons in the wet grass (an offering?), the sky, a hawk on a tree. But no matter where she went, nothing was ever quiet enough. Despite my best efforts, the narrative was bleak; it lacked tension and a convincing resolution. Now, why am I telling you all this? Well, one day I woke up and it had been raining in the Oakland of my actual life. Outside my window, the cottonwood trees looked like the day before, ...

I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbors with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. George Eliot, Silas Marner

Back then I was going steady with fog, who could dance like no one’s business, I threw her over for a leaf that one day fluttered first her shadow then her whole life into my hand, that’s a lot of responsibility and a lot of relatives, this leaf and that leaf and all the other leaves hung around, I told her I needed space, which was true, without it I’d only be a soul, and no one’s sure that wisp is real, that’s why we say of real estate, location, location, location, and of speech, locution, locution, locution, and of love, yes, yes, yes, I am on my knees, will you have me, world? Bob Hicok

         After Ken Workman When someone asks me for my papers, I think of land acknowledgements. Ken says, You know him as Chief Seattle. I know him as grandpa. It’s important that when you’re here, on this land, you know where you are. A man named Lee invented the Southern strategy; now it’s gone digital. Ready or not. Don’t make people perform their pain. My name tells you my father’s name, his father’s, his, and so on. Yet no heads nod. Aphorizing again, the keynote says solidarity is a verb—a nation solidarities its aim solid. The game: geographic realignment. Miami-Dade. Dekalb. King. We could win where we play the hardest. Center base. Power forward. Running back. I’ve never lived in the South, yet I know generous people. We live in Puyallup, the woman in the video says, Everyone got messed up bumpers but the cop pulled me over. You know why. All of this is just an excuse to do the right thing. You know what kind of person needs an excuse to...

And then the gray concrete of the subway platform, that shore     stripped of all premise of softness or repose. I stood there, beneath the city's sequential grids     and frameworks, its wrappings and unwrappings like a robe sewn with birds that flew into seasons of light,     a robe of gold and then a robe of ash. All around me were briefcases, cell phones, baseball caps,     folded umbrellas forlorn and still glistening with rain. Who owned them? Each face possessed a hiddenness.     DO NOT STEP ACROSS THE YELLOW LINE; the Transit Authority had painted this onto the platform's edge     beyond which the rails gleamed, treacherous, almost maniacal,     yet somehow full of promise. Glittery, icy, undead. Sharp as acid eating through a mask. I counted forward     in my mind to the third rail, bristling with current, hissing inside it like a promise or a wish; and the wo...

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...