a shandean commonplace book

         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