Tell me, is the rose naked,
Or is that her only dress?
Why do trees conceal
The splendor of their roots?
Who hears the regrets
of the thieving automobile?
Is there anything in the world sadder
Than a train standing in the rain?
Category Archives: Fiction
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]
Lines Off My Mind’s Shelf
The other day, despite my desires, I was thinking perpetually of her hair. At the same time, it was long and short. Her fingernails could run through it, just thick enough to carve ridges that would stay for a moment too long.
She invited me to her apartment, and, naturally, I arrived there. I was thinking still about her hair, about her name, her motives. Despite my desire to let loose and enjoy myself, my mind rattled like an engine struggling to start.
Thinking as I was, the door opened to show her face. On the couch she sat smiling. Now, I would have gone if it weren’t for a pair of persuasive hands.
“Are you relaxed?” she said.
“Would you like a back rub?” she said.
Thoughts percolated through my eyes; they could not see peacefulness. To where is this leading? Who is she, really?
She answered few of my thoughts—by no fault of her own—for she was not telepathic. However, I melted to her touch and I breathed to her thrust.
It came time to leave, “Good night,” she said. “Will I see you tomorrow?”
“Mmmhmm,” I said. Tense.
Home was empty, no roommates around. I walked through the dark bedroom to switch on the lone bedside lamp. It was cold until I slipped into my pajamas and huddled underneath the duvet. I saw a blinking red light, a text from her, on my phone. The blink echoed into the vacant room, exposing the emptiness with each pulse. I let it beat in the space until I decided I wanted to be in my own company. I turned over the phone to smother the flashing red light and turned my mind to the pictures on the wall. Paintings and photographs smiled overhead, and I sunk low into the bed, in good company.
Lines Off My Mind’s Shelf
Before the thought formed in her head, the words split her lips, “I am not broken.” There were two dalmation dogs tackling each other in the distance. The older lady dragging a leash on the ground a distance behind them. The dogs were jumping and clawing. The dogs were angry, or was it the girl?
The girl sat on the curb. “I am not broken.” If she brought these words into the air maybe it would become real. “I am not broken.” The words fell on her ears and she listened. Then she said it again. She had to believe this was true. “I am not broken.”
The mantra helped her stand up. She firmly balanced the middle arches of her feet on the curb. “I am not broken,” she spoke. This is my earth, she thought. I am strong enough to live here. I need not do anything other than breathe. If only her breath weren’t so broken.
Excerpt from On the Road – Jack Kerouac
That night in Harrisburg I had to sleep in the railroad station on a bench; at dawn the station masters threw me out. Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life. I stumbled haggardly out of the station; I had no more control.
All I could see of the morning was a whiteness like the whiteness of the tomb. I was starving to death.
All I had left in the form of calories were the last of the cough drops I’d bought in Shelton, Nebraska, months ago; these I sucked for their sugar. I didn’t know how to panhandle. I stumbled out of town with barely enough strength to reach the city limits. I knew I’d be arrested if I spent another night in Harrisburg. Cursed city! The ride I proceeded to get was with a skinny, haggard man who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health. When I told him I was starving to death as we rolled east he said, “Fine, fine, there’s nothing better for you. I myself haven’t eaten for three days. I’m going to live to be a hundred and fifty years old.” He was a bag of bones, a floppy doll, a broken stick, a maniac. I might have gotten a ride with an affluent fat man who’d say, “Let’s stop at this restaurant and have some pork chops and beans.”
No, I had to get a ride that morning with a maniac who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health.
After a hundred miles he grew lenient and took out bread-and-butter sandwiches from the back of the car. They were hidden among his salesman samples. He was selling plumbing fixtures around Pennsylvania. I devoured the bread and butter. Suddenly I began to laugh. I was all alone in the car, waiting for him as he made business calls in Allentown, and I laughed and laughed. Gad, I was sick and tired of life. But the madman drove me home to New York.
drunken library 