Author Archives: Drunken Librarian

Hilary Scheppers is a writer, artist, and poet. California | Minnesota | Colorado | New York

Excerpt from Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

David Mitchell: “Letters From Zedelghem”

Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father’s generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don’t recall its name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end.

To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer’s profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, “Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!”

How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.

As Long As You’re Out There Somewhere Shining

Lines Off My Mind’s Shelf


He cut off Hunter, talking about something as we sat around the bar table—

“Will you stop that?” he said to me, smiling.

I was bopping my head as I responded to a text message on my phone. Without looking up at him, I grinned, stood up and continued dancing, spinning around to the music of the room until I pressed send. He laughed and got up too.

“Now, you’re both embarrassing me,” Hunter said.

“You have to come join us,” I said.

He stood up and we all danced solo in the empty room of the Jazz club. We were the only guests besides the man fixing the stage in the corner. The waitresses behind the bar laughed casually at our sparse entertainment. The only light in the room streamed through the front door, white, propped open to remind us of the absurdity that was us hiding in the dark during such beautiful daylight. It was 4:30pm on a Sunday, and it was happy hour. 

Excerpt from Cloud Atlas (II)

David Mitchell: “Letters From Zedelghem”

After supper, the three of us might listen to the wireless if there is a broadcast that passes muster, otherwise it will be recordings on the gramophone (an His Master’s Voice table model in an oak box), usually Ayrs’s own major works conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. When we have visitors, there will be conversation or a little chamber music. Other nights, Ayrs likes me to read to him poetry, especially his beloved Keats. He whispers the verses as I recite, as if his voice is leaning on mine.

“All I Need” – Lines Off My Mind’s Shelf

One hand clenching a fistful of bed-hair at the back of her head. Her right hand aloft in front of her like a limp wing for balance. Her steps follow a rhythm. It is steady. But it also changes from 3/4 time to 6/8 time. Her right hip places an accent on a different quiver. 

A horn blows from the traffic flowing past.

She picks up her skirt so that her ankles can ascend the staircase. One two three, and two three. The groove changes. 

Her heel slips from her flat brown shoe and there is a rest. She quickly shifts her foot back in, slides into it and catches back up to speed.

A raven soars ahead, unmoving. Suspended. The wind picks up her hair. Limp and winged. The breath never leaves—like the beat can never leave.

“I Lick the Froth” – H. M. Scheppers

My tongue like bark,

I lick the froth from

my steamed soy milk

like the taste of Mom’s pinecone crafts.

Unlike the sap of my early days

of 2% that Mom had filled for my

jelly jar glass each dinner 

in the dining room with crystals.

Like cardboard, soy steam pours

over my tongue’s tip—

scrapes the buds, like the way 

Dad scraped buds in the backyard, 

the lawnmower chasing us 

in diagonals and cupcakes.

My mouth a dry scone,

I sip more, sipping mean,

until my tongue chars like

the night I reached for the switch

and realized Dad no longer

tucked me in.

The grand bland lather of Silk

rushes over my tongue of shingles 

until the foam slopes at the bottom

like shampoo slopping below my ear.

My tongue of pinecones, bitter and

arching for froth,

for the kitchen sink after midnight,

for a venom of milk,

for the sap of my early days.

Lines Off My Mind’s Shelf: Una poesia di mio

“I was intricately woven in the depths of the earth” – Psalm 139:15


Of the earth

The snow is an illusion 

masking         my youth

below it.

I wish I could hold it

and behold— 

               I’m old from it.

The labyrinth, latent behind—

my forehead— 

my eyes         donning 

sheets of an unmade bed.

My sister says you are the white and black


I face myself

an injured pigeon

woven in the depths

This is how you were made:

w[hole]