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Passages

• Our servants were invisible. They ran about with heavy trunks containing their own lives. When we tipped them they glowed like embers.

  *

  Sometimes we wanted rain. We knew the right people. They'd come running with their dry excuses. It was the excuses that we really wanted.

  From George Szirtes.

• Just as Tom was about to go out and check the post today, we have external mailboxes here, of course, though ours is only a step from the house, and our regular posties tend to wait for us to come out and hand the mail over, there was an enormous thump on the window which made us nearly jump out of our skins.  It was not one but two squabbling cock chaffinches, so absorbed in their quarrel they forgot to look where they were going.  One of them landed, punch drunk, on the fence post outside the window.  At first, he was very wonky, his sides heaving, so knowing that having time to recover from shocks like this can make the difference between life and death for small birds, we waited for him to fly off at his leisure, before going out for the post.

  From box elder

• A woman once stopped me in the street and, holding her eyelids apart, asked me to remove the log in her eye. Wary of religious folklore –and of the sharp, crystal edges of the talc that clung to her clothes- I shook my head.

  “No, no,” the woman said. “Look harder.”

  I saw a piece of eyelash nestled on the orange inside of her eyelid.

  From Soulfool.

• My affair with the book is personal, one-to-one, physical, intimate. As long as I’m reading the book, I do not share my attention or my affections with anything or anyone else: I am with the book, the book is with me, in my hands. We share a private universe, complete in itself.

  Reading an eBook, I am with the gadget, which is a container. It may be smart, but it still is a container. It is not a book. I don’t feel it, and my attention is shared: with the gadget, and with the innumerable distractions the gadget offers. Due to these intrusions, it is no longer a private universe. I no longer feel I’m reading a book.

  From Parmanu.

• This is a new stillness, not requiring silence. An urban stillness I'm learning in the midst of constant motion, crowdedness, squalor and clutter, beauty and glitter; amid things I don't understand and things I understand too well; a stillness in spite of the fact that I myself am moving, changing; a growing solitude that is, paradoxically, full.

  From the cassandra pages

• Barwin is a surrealist, as this example demonstrates, and my favorite poems in the book were those that explored just a few images, as “Planting Consent” does. Some of the poems failed to cohere for me — which isn’t to say I didn’t still enjoy reading them. More than anything else, this book is fun, and even the craziest or most experimental poems have memorable lines and images.

  From Via Negativa.