My Scrapbook

“[I]n that library I experienced loneliness, real loneliness, but also exquisite artistic loneliness: You’re lonely but also exquisitely happy if it’s snowing outside and you’re working on a novel. There’s nothing more gorgeous than that.”

—Kiran Desai, quoted in Poets & Writers

Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut #3

You know you are expected to respond,

that rules establish how to choose your words.

Instead, you lead her out beyond the edge

and watch her iron shackles become birds.

Surrender to this failure. Shave your head.

Embrace her like the resurrected dead.

Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut #4

You did not create

the arrogance

that lies in wait.

Wilted in the sun,

surrendered generosity

is not an accident.

Facts matter.

So does silence.

A lesson I learn each time I think I’ve finished a manuscript: that’s when I need to let it sit for however long it takes—this time it’s been more than a year—before I read through it at least twice more to catch at the manuscript level what needs changing. I’m always way to programmatic at first, but I need to do that in order to be able to let my intuition do its work. When that work is done, so is the manuscript.

Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut #2

They can’t be less inhuman than they are.

The line of people leaving, a living scar

across the flesh that was our home, stretched far

beyond where I, at six years old, could see.

Even now, that child breathes in me,

riding his father's shoulders, hiding the jar

of colored shells he feared they’d confiscate

beneath the coat his mother wrapped him in.

And there I saw the seed upon the mountain
but it was not a seed it was a star
but it was not a star in was a world
but it was not a world it was a god
but it was not a god it was a laughter

blood red within and lightning for its rind
the root came out like gold and it was anger
the root came out like fire and it was fury
the root came out like horn and it was purpose
but it was not a root it was a hand

—from “Time in the Rock or Prelude to Definition,” Conrad Aiken

You hate me, but you do not need my body for that. In fact, it’s much easier without my body. All you really need is the idea of me, the vessel into which you pour everything you're afraid is in you and that you do not want to be.

Lines That Didn’t Make The Cut #1

...when I finally slept again, I reentered the house that wasn’t mine, that I nonetheless knew as intimately as if I’d built it myself. At the turn in the hallway leading to the kitchen, I stood suddenly face to face with my mother-in-law, who was holding her phone in front of her, blank screen facing outward like a shield, as she repeated over and over again, softly, under her breath, “Boro, boro kenar!” I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me or to whatever she saw behind her clenched eyelids, but when she pushed me out of the way—somehow she knew where she was going without having to see—she pushed me once more into the waking world, which is why I’m sitting here, jasmine tea steaming at the edge of my desk, staring at the black cat giving futile chase across the cup’s outer curve to the mouse mocking her from the opposite inner curve. The house, of course, was me; my mother-in-law, a part of me my dreaming self chose to conjure as her. Even in the dream, I didn’t know what I was looking for or why it would have been in the kitchen, only that what I sensed hovering in the emptiness beyond the line I used my mother-in-law’s push to keep myself from crossing had been waiting there for a longer time than I wanted to admit, ready and eager to pounce.

Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand, here I am sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, with visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

—Virginia Woolf, letter to Vita Sackville-West (with thanks to Sven Birkerts, who quoted it in his Editor's Note, “The Dream of the Ring,” for Agni 101)