a shandean commonplace book

The earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through. The earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat so we could die and live again. I wish the earth was     our mother So she'd be kind to us. I wish we were pictures on the rocks for our dreams to carry As mirrors. We saw the faces of those to be killed by the last of us in the last defense of the soul. We cried over their children's feast. We saw the faces of those who'll throw our children Out of the windows of the last space. Our star will hang up in mirrors. Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky? Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air? We will write our names with scarlet steam. We will cut off the head of the song to be finished by our flesh. We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree. Mahmoud Darwish

There we were, Penelope, my Border Collie mix, and I, one godless the other faithful, observing the fiery orange at the left side of the horizon, no bigger than my thumb, say, shy in profile, exhausting another of its ration of daybreaks, while off to the far right the ghostly white spider moon, dangling by its dreamy thread. That's when Lady P barked at the blind man measuring each step slowly emerging out of the shadows, a duel of balance and resolve. Indeed, miles from town, how had he gotten here? Head tilted toward the waves, as if listening to their instruction, his own intuition. That's when, out of the dunes, the deer came, a buck, doe and three yearlings, frozen in a jittery vigilance, the wonder of their long elegance turning to find us, Penelope, obeying my call of silence, bursting with an excitement the blind man sensed, turning toward them, their poise, their keenness, each of us suddenly an industry of looking, of not breathing, a tiny fragile presence, colliding...

You know how it pretends to have a broken wing to lure predators away from its nest, how it staggers just out of reach . . . if, at this moment, you’re feeling metaphorical, nest can be the whatever inside us that we think needs protection, the whatever that is small & hasn’t yet found its way. Like us it has lived so long on scraps, on what others have left behind, it thinks it could live on air, on words, forever almost, it thinks it would be better to let the predator kill it than to turn its back on that child again, forgetting that one lives inside the other. Nick Flynn

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It's the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last. Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist. Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy. I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just co...

When I was a weaver, I chose a red silk thread to get me to the heart of my creation and then back out, across the loom, to whatever life was waiting. And when you found the little red pathway, buried between warp and woof, you were sure you'd found a flaw. Please remember what happens when there's no exit. Years of breathing wool dust, reeking of lanolin, staring into coils of green yarn and blue—you go dumb. You've heard the story a thousand times— that trapped fox, whining and snuffling then biting her paw through the bone, and running off into the night. The mind wants this: a door in the wall,          an open field, a narrow path          through the woods, an open field Helen Wickes

we are not asked to see, the ridged folds of the black walnuts, fallen, come veined as any mind split from its skull, leaching what little parades as peace. Rot and wet. My right instep, sneaker's underneath, crushes a once greener skin gone brackish at the cap. Looking up, the branches meet in an arch you can walk under, pass through. And down the road, when I hear the patient father calling to his child stay away from the stick, I know he means street because of the cars and the highway in his head that's been riddled for months now with the tumors. The girl is seven. She's putting some of the still unbroken nuts in her plastic bag for her collage because the seeds inside are small and hard. I bring food to their porch, I say you are in my thoughts. A week ago when the wife asked, what's my name, he said, you are the woman. She says, It started with a pounding in the temple. Then the years' cells brewing fault, breaking bole from bark, furrows from solid trunk mak...

Catchy but deliberately ambiguous. Self-effacing, coy, funny, funny, funny: poignant. Funny. Poignant, poignancy implying a general statement about the world and the way humans behave toward one another. General statement about the world. Slight redaction of that statement through irony, serving to undercut the broad statement while reinforcing a smaller, more incisive version of the truth it conveys. Funny and poignant and charming end which you then have to live like you believe. Robert Cantoni