All Aboard the Train to Utter Stillness

[Image: “Vogel duikbank,” by a Flickr user who goes by the name (?) Ebelien. Found it there, of course, and — likewise — use it here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!)]

From whiskey river:

More than ever, I’ve come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change. Is it any wonder that the world seems full of strange and implacable forces to someone who doesn’t know how to look up a Zip Code, use a computerized card catalog, or even make a long-distance phone call? When my husband tended bar in Lemmon, he was often asked to place calls for people flustered by a pay phone. The night he telephoned a research library at a university in California to settle a barroom dispute about the planets is now part of local legend. He might as well have been a shaman.

(Kathleen Norris [source])

…and:

Directions

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.
— Hamlet

Take a plane to London.
From King’s Cross take the direct train to York.
Rent a car and drive across the vale to Ripon,
then into the dales toward the valley of the Nidd,
a narrow road with high stone walls on each side,
and soon you’ll be on the moors. There’s a pub,
The Drovers, where it’s warm inside, a tiny room,
you can stand at the counter and drink a pint of Old Peculier.
For a moment everything will be all right. You’re back
at a beginning. Soon you’ll walk into Yorkshire country,
into dells, farms, into blackberry and cloud country.
You’ll walk for hours. You’ll walk the freshness
back into your life. This is true. You can do this.
Even now, sitting at your desk, worrying, troubled,
you can gaze across Middlesmoor to Ramsgill,
the copses, the abbeys of slanting light, the fells,
you can look down on that figure walking toward Scar House,
cheeks flushed, curlews rising in front of him, walking,
making his way, working his life, step by step, into grace.

(Joseph Stroud [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Blue

I stand there under the high limbs of locust
watching my father point a black gun into the air

his arms steepled for the stillness
required to split the proverbial hair

with a BB. I would like to throw a red hat 
to catch what will smack from the barrel

but instead the songbird drops fast—a warm
stone through liquid swimming between us.

The stink of yellow sulfur thick. And the twist
of his mouth, like tangled purple boughs

or crossed legs of what he never dreamed he’d hit.
Years after, I will admit only to so much. Blue

moon tomorrow. Do we ever get a second
chance? It’s what I don’t say that speaks loudest.

(Katrina Roberts [source])

…and:

With machines coming to seem part of our nervous systems, while increasing their speed every season, we’ve lost our Sundays, our weekends, our nights off — our holy days, as some would have it; our bosses, junk mailers, our parents can find us wherever we are, at any time of day or night. More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.

(Pico Iyer [source])

…and:

December

Lodged tight for days
in a corner of the wall,
ladybug can’t resist the tree,

crawling now over cold
light, ceramic fruits,
tinsel lamb and sleigh.

Flies out of the tree
to try rum cake on a
plate of caroling cherubs.

Ends up on her back,
wings flared, silly girl
spinning over the kitchen floor.

Later, between the blinds,
tiny bump of silhouette:
a stillness against the falling snow.

(Roger Pfingston [source])

…and:

18: You close your eyes, you say: I wish the world were still that way — the way it used to be. You open your eyes; it remains different… or it resembles the world you remember from twenty years ago. You close your eyes: Ah, yes, there it is once again… or perhaps, What? I never saw that before. You sit a moment. You open your eyes… over and over.

Blue sky, crossed by a single bird or a flock, or by a power line or translucent scudding clouds; lightning flashes and stars; a leaf falls from a tree today, a bud emerges from the same tree, the same limb, next Wednesday; a door swings open and a loved one enters, or that door — or a different door — closes behind an electrician or realtor you’d never seen before…

The world is ever the way it used to be. It never will be so again.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)