a shandean commonplace book

Heart weeps. Head tries to help heart. Head tells heart how it is, again:     You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday. Heart feels better, then. But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart. Heart is so new to this. I want them back, says heart. Head is all heart has. Help, head. Help heart. Lydia Davis

and I can't sleep so I'm up thinking too hard scribbling these words in the dark because the physics science news I read before bed is making me crazy now with incomprehension—it makes no sense to me that gravity should exist, what I know about is love: that flaring up of caring connection that lasts life-long and does not depend on distance, and it makes no sense to me that the speed of light in a vacuum should be a constant in this universe transforming at every instant along the way, speeding and slowing, and it makes no sense to me that there should have been an origin of the universe and before that nothing— surely it was everything, waiting there? When our lives are spun out of star furnaces and our histories of DNA mutable, shifting, remaking themselves in us—all that stuff of the universe spun out of nothing? It makes no sense, and it makes no sense that time should have a beginning and no end, for what was the constant face of love before time began and before matter a...

Pigeons fold their wings and fade into the gray facades of public places; flags descend from banks, silk slips floating to beds. Hips thrust like those of lovers, as workers crank through turnstiles, and waiting for the Ravenswood express at stations level with the sky, they shield their eyes with newspapers against a dying radiance; that lull between trains when stratified fire is balanced on a gleaming spire. Night doesn't fall, but rather, all the disregarded shadows of a day flock like blackbirds, and suddenly rise. Stuart Dybek

 The phlox in the jar is softening, from the sphere of it a blossom flutters, and the whole sagging thing makes me think of my mother’s flesh, when she was elderly, and it was wilting, keeping its prettiness in its old-fangled gentleness. It’s as if I’m falling in love, again, with my mother, through the gallowsglass of my own oncoming elderliness, as if, now that she has been gone from the earth as many years as a witch’s familiar has lives, I can catch glimpses of my mother, at moments when she was alone with herself, and would pick up her pen and Latinate vocabulary, and describe what it was like, on their last cruise, when she rose, by invitation, from the captain’s table, and stood behind the black, grand Steinway, in the open ocean, and sang. I do not need a picture to remind me of the look on my mom’s face, when she sang – extreme yearning, a yearning out at the edge of what was socially acceptable on a ship like that, and you could also see how happy her face was, to be loo...

Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he’s dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said. Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning Stevie Smith

 No wind. No storm. Just the trees heaving in their own sorrow. The girl next door who went missing a week ago Has come back; the faces of her parents stare Like bare, wounded hills beyond the river. Often a dream makes one afraid Of the things one might do. It frightens one That despair seems to have no boundaries. The laments for a death are over while death Is warm and safe and drifts into sleep In a child’s dream. Some time back I had stumbled On the decomposing bodies of a young couple On the hill slope behind the temple. The girl Couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. I had made a great effort to defend myself. Her half-open eyes now wander through My subdued Sunday mornings as though testing The courage it took to be a man. No wind. No storm. Just the vague light of daybreak Coming down from the hilltops. An unknown darkening is in my breath. And I knew death is born to us in the same way As when we cast our nets into the night And draw in the shapes of day. Jayanta...

Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more. Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know. Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord to keep it from fraying? Not the man who called my life a debacle, a word whose sound I love. In a debacle things are unleashed. Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary. I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate, the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing. They don’t use words, but they can be said to love. They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree. And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing stops them, it’s called inosculation : to unite by openings, to connect or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare , to provide with a mouth, from osculum , little mouth. Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among bi...