Like a city I’ve always hated, driving through but never stopping,
my foot on the gas, running all the lights,
wishing I were home. Hating even the children who live there
as if they had a choice. I imagine him
in his ten-million particles
of ash, tied up into a beautiful white bundle of lace, a silver bow
looped where his neck should be,
thrown into a washing machine, set on a delicate cycle
to spin forever under the dirt. The all of him
left, the vegetation of him, the no more thing
of him: his skateboard and mountain bike and beers and cigarettes and daughter
and mix-tapes and loneliness, his legs and feet and arms and brain and kneecaps.
Outside of the graveyard
there is still some part of him
buried in the mysticism of his DNA, smeared across a doorknob
or brushed along the jagged edge of his car keys. Two kids
from the high school nearby
will fuck each other on top of him
and I won’t know how to stop them. Someone, sometime,
will throw an empty bottle of vodka over their shoulder
and he will have to catch it.

–Matthew Dickman
–Found in The Normal School, Fall 2009

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–Jonathan Franzen
–found in “A Rooting Interest,” The New Yorker, February 13/20 Edition

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“Photograph from September 11″

They jumped from the burning floors–
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.

The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.

Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.

There’s enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.

They’re still within the air’s reach,
within the compass of places
that have just now opened.

I can do only two things for them–
describe this flight
and not add a last line.

–Wisława Szymborska (Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak)

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“The End of the Beginning”

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

Again we’ll need bridges
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls how it was.
Someone listens
and nods with unsevered head.
Yet others milling about
already find it dull.

From behind the bush
sometimes someone still unearths
rust-eaten arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must give way to
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass which has overgrown
reasons and causes,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

–Wisława Szymborska (Translated from Polish by: Joanna Maria Trzeciak)

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She had a dream
Woke up in shock
She had seen
Her own body outlined in chalk
I split the scene, the globe been spun
And her ghost leaned down to kiss me
With a message from the sun
Don’t go down
Don’t go down
Stay with me, baby, stay

–lyrics by Elliott Smith from “Don’t Go Down”
found in the album From a Basement on the Hill

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–Michel de Montaigne
from “By diverse means we arrive at the same end”

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–Michel de Montaigne
from “Of custom”

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“Midwinter”

A blue light
radiates from my clothing.
Midwinter.
Clattering tambourines of ice.
I close my eyes.
There is a silent world
there is a crack
where the dead
are smuggled across the border.

–by Tomas Tranströmer
found in The Sorrow Gondola

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“Literary nonfiction is no place for the rule-followers anyhow. The essay thrives on idiosyncracy, even perversity, on the workings of the individual mind. It parks at expired meters. Feels ironic, then hardcore, then ironic again, blasting De La Soul in its GPSed Subaru with butt warmers on high.

Creative nonfiction in general is no place for the pious, the reverent, the pertinent. Good girls: y’all go on home. Like hackers or raccoons we who remain will pry open whatever. Creative is forever prying open nonfiction, creating a space inside it for artful exploration. Or if you prefer, literary is dry-humping nonfiction. Or lyric is giving a wedgie to essay. And essay is always pulling itself apart because it likes suffering.

In that sense, the only reason for rules is so we have something to break, to bend, to spindle, to mutilate. And that, I think, is a powerful rationale for us to all embrace every rule we can find. As information theorist Bruce Mau puts it, “now that we can do anything, what will we do?” It’s hard to tackle formlessness, limitlessness without some scaffolding or sense of the boundaries.

Writers are not well behaved. We want something to push against. We need you critics to tell us what not to do, so we can do it, you pissed folks who bought Frey’s book and returned it in rage, you Oprahs, you hair-splitters about literary ethics—we need you on that wall.

Our role as nonfictioners who aspire to art is to say, think, and build something interesting, interestingly. If we worship story, then we need to understand that story is what we’re workshopping, I mean worshipping. In that pursuit we’re feeding truth into the woodchipper, feet-first. It screams real loud as it goes.”

–Ander Monson
from The Woodchipper

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On New Year’s Day
each thought a loneliness
as winter dusk descends

–Matsuo Basho

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