[Image: “Choreology,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The Moment

Walking the three tiers in first light, out
here so my two-year-old son won’t wake the house,
I watch him pull and strip ragweed, chicory, yarrow,
so many other weeds and wildflowers
I don’t know the names for, him saying Big, and Mine,
and Joshua—words, words, words. Then
it is the moment, that split-second
when he takes my hand, gives it a tug,
and I feel his entire body-weight, his whole
heart-weight, pulling me toward
the gleaming flowers and weeds he loves.
That moment which is eternal and is gone in a second,
when he yanks me out of myself like some sleeper
from his dead-dream sleep into the blues and whites
and yellows I must bend down to see clearly, into
the faultless flesh of his soft hands, his new brown eyes,
the miracle of him, and of the earth itself,
where he lives among the glitterings, and takes me.

(Len Roberts [source])

…and:

Suddenly I understood that we must take care of things just because they exist.

(Maura O’Halloran [source])

…and (with an ellipsis filled in):

It would be better, think they, if Heaven were above and Hell below—anywhere outside, but not within. But that comfort has been knocked from under us. There are no places to go to, either for reward or punishment. The place is always here and now, in your own person and according to your own fancy. The world is exactly what you picture it to be, always, every instant. It is impossible to shift the scenery about and pretend that you will enjoy another, a different act. The setting is permanent, changing with the mind and heart, not according to the dictates of an invisible stage director. You are the author, director and actor all in one: the drama is always going to be your own life, not someone else’s. A beautiful, terrible, ineluctable drama, like a suit made of your own skin. Would you want it otherwise? Could you invent a better drama?

(Henry Miller [source])

From elsewhere:

Here in New England, each season carries a hundred foreshadowings of the season that is to follow-which is one of the things I love about it. Winter is rough and long, but spring lies all round about. Yesterday, a small white keel feather escaped from my goose and lodged in the bank boughs near the kitchen porch, where I spied it as I came home in the cold twilight. The minute I saw the feather, I was projected into May, knowing that a barn swallow would be along to claim the prize and use it to decorate the front edge of its nest. Immediately, the December air seemed full of wings of swallows and the warmth of barns. Swallows, I have noticed, never use any feather but a white one in their nest-building, and they always leave a lot of it showing, which makes me believe that they are interested not in the feather’s insulating power but in its reflecting power, so that when they skim into the dark barn from the bright outdoors they will have a beacon to steer by.

(E.B. White [source])

…and:

Kablooey is the Sound You’ll Hear

then plaster falling and the billow of gypsum
after your sister blows a hole in the ceiling
of your brother’s bedroom with the shotgun
he left loaded and resting on his dresser.

It’s Saturday, and the men are in the fields.
You and your sister are cleaning house
with your mother. Maybe your sister hates
cleaning that much, or maybe she’s just

that thorough, but somehow she has lifted
the gun to dust it or dust under it (you are busy
mopping the stairs) and from the top landing
where you stand, you turn toward the sound

to see your sister cradling the smoking shotgun
in her surprised arms, like a beauty queen
clutching a bouquet of long-stemmed roses
after being pronounced the official winner.

Then the smell of burnt gunpowder
reaches you, dirty orange and sulfurous,
like spent fireworks, and through the veil
of smoke you see a hole smoldering

above her head, a halo of perforations
in the ceiling—the drywall blown clean
through insulation to naked joists, that dark
constellation where the buckshot spread.

The look on your sister’s face is pure
shitfaced shock. You’d like to stop and
photograph it for blackmail or future
family stories but now you must focus

on the face of your mother, frozen at the base
of the stairs where she has rushed from
vacuuming or waxing, her frantic eyes
searching your face for some clue

about the extent of the catastrophe.
But it’s like that heavy quicksand dream
where you can’t move or speak,
so your mother scrambles up the steps

on all fours, rushes past you, to the room
where your sister has just now found her voice,
already screaming her story—it just went off!
it just went off! —as if a shotgun left to rest

on safety would rise and fire itself.
All this will be hashed and re-hashed around
the supper table, but what stays with you
all these years later, what you cannot forget,

is that moment when your mother
waited at the bottom of the steps
for a word from you, one word,
and all you could offer her was silence.

(Debra Marquart [source])

…and:

I watched the faces of the mourners gathered around Dr. Gauss’s grave. They varied in age. The older ones sat on folding chairs while the rest of us stood. I tried to read people’s faces. Some had their heads bowed. Some looked around. One man blew his nose aggressively while the woman next to him watched, a look on her face that suggested she wanted to harm him. There was the occasional yawn. A few people snuck a peek at their phone, checking a text from a colleague, perhaps, a lover, the weather, a fantasy baseball league. Did they know the old man well?

[…]

A priest shook holy water onto the casket from a silver container that looked like a tall pepper mill.

“O God,” he intoned, “who by the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light, grant your servant Walter to your…”

A few murmurs from the assembled. “Walter?” I heard someone say. At the center of the crowd around the grave, wearing black, an old woman sat in a folding chair. She lifted her head, a confused expression on her weathered face, and shouted. “Walter? His name isn’t Walter! It’s Samuel!”

The priest said, “I am so… I am so sorry. I’m doing another… later on…”

He cleared his throat and started again.

Tim whispered, “I have to admit that this is more interesting than I thought it would be.”

(John Kenney [source: nowhere online (yet), but from this book])