From "Death of a Moth"
  by Annie Dillard

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when the shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspread, flapped into the fire, drooped abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, and frazzled in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, like angels' wings, enlarging the circle of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine; at once the light contracted again and the moth's wings vanished in a fine, foul smoke. At the same time, her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a spattering noise; her antennae crisped and burnt away and her heaving mouthparts cracked like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far as I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Her head was a hole lost to time. All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax---a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle's round pool.

And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth's body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the shattered hole where her head should have been, and widened into a flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like an immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two winding flames of identical light, side by side. The moth's head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without swaying or kneeling---only glowing within, like a boiling fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brain in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

"Dover Beach"
  by Matthew Arnold


The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -- on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow,
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

"Storm Warnings"
  by Adrienne Rich


The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.

From Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride:

(And what an great title that was...)

(p.4--Tony):

     Where to start is the problem, because nothing begins when it begins and nothing's over when it's over, and everything needs a preface, a postscript, a chart of simultaneous events. History is a construct, she tells her students. Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary. Still, there are definitive moments, moments we use as references, because they break our sense of continuity, they change the direction of time. We can look at these events and we can say that after them things were never the same again. They provide beginnings for us, and endings, too. Births and deaths, for instance, and marriages. And wars.
     It's the wars that interest Tony, despite her lace-edged collars. She likes clear outcomes.
     So did Zenia, or so Tony thought once. Now, she can hardly tell.


     An arbitrary choice, then, a definitive moment: October 23, 1990. It's a bright clear day, unseasonably warm. It's a Tuesday. The Soviet bloc is crumbling, the old maps are dissolving, the Eastern tribes are on the move again across the shifting borders. There's trouble in the Gulf, the real estate market is crashing, and a large hole has developed in the ozone layer. The sun moves into Scorpio, Tony has lunch at the Toxique with her two friends Roz and Charis, a slight breeze blows in over Lake Ontario, and Zenia returns from the dead.

(p.39--Tony):

     She makes her away along Queen, then turns north on Spadina. She wills her feet to move, she wills the sun to shine. He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who puts it not unto the touch, To win, or lose it all, she repeats in her head. A bracing verse, a general favourite, a favourite of generals. What she needs is some perspective. Some evitcepsrep. A medicinal word.
     Gradually, her heart settles. It's soothing to be among strangers, who require from her no efforts, no explanations, no reassurances. She likes the mix on the street here, the mixed skins. Chinatown has taken over mostly, though there are still some Jewish delicatessens, and, further up and off to the side, the Portuguese and West Indian shops of the Kensington Market. Rome in the second century, Constantinople in the tenth, Vienna in the ninteenth. A crossroads. Those from other countries look as if they're trying hard to forget something, those from here as if they're trying hard to remember. Or maybe it's the other way around. In any case there's an inturned, preoccupied cast to the eyes, a sideways glancing. Music from elsewhere.

(p.77-78--Charis):

     To make herself less obvious as a watcher, she takes her notebook out of her tote bag, a lovely notebook she traded some of her paytime for. It has a hand-bound cover of marbled paper with a burgundy suede spine, and the pages are a delicate lavender. The pen she bought to go with it is pearl grey, and filled with grey-green ink. She got the pen at Radiance too, and the ink. It makes her sad to think of Radiance vanishing. So many gifts.
     The notebook is for her to write her thoughts in, but so far she hasn't written any. She hates to spoil the beauty of the blank pages, their potential; she doesn't want to use them up. But now she uncaps her pearl grey pen and prints: Zenia must go back.

(p.118-119--Roz):

     How long do I have to live before I'm rid of this junk, thinks Roz. The garage sale of the soul. She'll go home early, have a snack, pour herself a small drink, run a bath, put in some of the stuff Charis keeps deluging her with, from that hophead store where she works. Ground-up leaves, dried flowers, exotic roots, musty-hayfield aromas, snake oil, mole bones, age-old recipies brewed by certified crones. Not that Roz has a thing against crones, since at the rate she's going she'll soon be one herself.
     It'll relax you, says Charis, though Roz, you have to help out! Don't fight it! Go with it. Lie back. Float. Picture yourself in a warm ocean.
     But every time Roz tries this, there are sharks.

(p.223--Charis):

     "Listen lady, you want a hot dog or not?" says the vendor.
     "What?" says Charis, startled.
     "Crazy broad, shove off," says the vendor. "Get back in the bin. You're bothering the customers."
     If Charis were Roz, she'd say What customers? But if Charis were Roz she'd be in a state of deep shock. Zenia and Larry! But she's twice his age! thinks the vestige of Charis that remains from the time when age, in female-male relationships, was supposed to matter. The present Charis tells herself not the be judgmental. Why shouldn't women do what men have been doing for ages, namely robbing the cradle? Age is not the point. The point is not Zenia's age, but Zenia herself. Larry might as well be drinking liquid drain cleaner.

(p.427--Roz):

     "You didn't find her, did you?" says Roz. She hands him the drink she's poured for him, as in days of yore: a single-malt scotch, no ice. That's what he used to like, long long agi; that's what she's been drinking these days, and more of it than she should. The gesture of handing the glass to him softens her, because it's their old habit. Nostalgia for him seizes her by the throat. She fights against choking. He has a new tie on, an unfamiliar one, with grisly pastel tulips. The fingerprints of Zenia are all over it, like unseen scorch marks.
     "No," says Mitch. He won't look at her.
     "And if you had," says Roz, hardening herself again, lighting her own cigarette---she won't ask him to do it, they are way beyond such whimsical courtship gestures, not that he's leaping forward with arm outstretched---"what would you have done? Beat the shit out of her, or sicked the lawyers onto her, or given her a big sloppy kiss?"
     Mitch looks in her direction. He can't meet her eyes. It's as if she's semi-invisible, a kind of hovering blur. "I don't know," he says.
     "Well, at least that's honest," says Roz. "I'm glad you aren't lying to me." She's trying to keep her voice soft, to avoid the bitter cutting edge. He isn't lying to her, he isn't doing anything to her. There is no her, as far as he's concerned; she might as well not be here. Whatever he's doing is to himself. She has never felt so non-existent in her life. "So, what do you want?" She may as well ask, she may as well find out what's being demanded of her.

From Beth Gutcheon's Still Missing:

(p.25):

     Sachs took out two layers from the top and set the things in a row.  He looked deeper into the box and then straightened, saying, "You have a lot of fondue pots."
     "It was the year of the fondue pot, the year I got married."
     "My wife loves fondue pots," said Sachs.  "She enjoys eating things with those little forks."
     Susan smiled.  If the world was ending, if her son were gone, would detectives talk of eating with little forks?
     "I bet your wife feels safer having you work in Juvenile than on the Bomb Squad or something," she offered.
     "Oh, I'm not on Juvenile," Sachs said.  "I'm on Homicide."

(p.59-60):

     "Did you see Susan on the news?  She was incredible."
     "No, I didn't, I heard about it.  I was still on the phone, but Chris said she was totally calm."
     "She was incredible.  Just very dignified and collected.  'My little boy has been stolen and he's probably been raped and murdered, and I'm not going to fall apart as long as there's a single thing I can do to help him.'  It was like that.  If it were me, I'd have been on there screaming.  'They've got my kid, you fat fuckers, put down your beer cans and get out there and help me!'"

(p.272):

     "Well," she said when there was a lull, "I have something to share with you, but I have no intention of shouting."  There was a sudden relative quiet although no pause in the flashing of camera bulbs from the print media.  She said, "Two hundred years ago, when a family suffered as this one has, there would be straw put down in front of the house to deaden the sounds of wheels, and horses' hooves would be muffled before they entered the streets.  No one expects such a show of civility now, but this family has lost enough.  It would be good of you to allow them to mourn in private."  There was a brief silence during which Margaret wisely made her way off down the steps before the questions could start again.
     "Wish I'd done that," said Susan's father.  Susan was obscurely pleased.  When she thanked her for it that evening, Margaret smiled her remarkable smile and said, "Yes, sometimes there's comfort in a really fruitless gesture."

"Recuerdo"
  by Edna St. Vincent Millay


We were very tired, we were very merry --
We had gone back and forth all night upon the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable --
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on the hill-top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry --
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and the pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

From Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace:

(p.23):

     Sometimes when I am dusting the mirror with the grapes I look at myself in it, although I know it is vanity.  In the afternoon light of the parlour my skin is a pale mauve, like a faded bruise, and my teeth are greenish.  I think of all the things that have been written about me---that I am an inhuman female demon, that I am an innocent victim of a blackguard forced against my will and in danger of my own life, that I was too ignorant to know how to act and that to hang me would be judicial murder, that I am fond of animals, that I am very handsome with a brilliant complexion, that I have blue eyes, that I have green eyes, that I have auburn and also brown hair, that I am tall and also not above the average height, that I have well and decently dressed, that I robbed a dead woman to appear so, that I am brisk and smart about my work, that I am of a sullen disposition with a quarrelsome temper, that I have the appearance of a person rather above my humble station, that I am a good girl with a pliable nature and no harm is told of me, that I am cunning and devious, that I am soft in the head and little better than an idiot.  And I wonder, how can I be all of these different things at once?
     It was my own lawyer, Mr. Kenneth MacKenzie, Esq., who told them I was next door to an idiot.  I was angry with him over that, but he said it was by far my best chance and I should not appear to be too intelligent.  He said he would plead my case to the utmost of his ability, because whatever the truth of the matter I was little more than a child at the time, and he supposed it came down to free will and whether or not one held with it.  He was a kind gentlyman although I could not make head nor tail or much of what he said, but it must have been good pleading.  The newspapers wrote that he performed heroically against overwhelming odds.  Though I don't know why they called it pleading, as he was not pleading but trying to make all of the witnesses appear immoral or malicious, or else mistaken.
     I wonder if he ever believed a word I said.

(p.91):

     "They said at the time that they were making an example of me.  That's why it was the death sentence, and then the life sentence."
     But what does an example do, afterwards? thought Simon.  Her story is over.  The main story, that is; the thing that has defined her.  How is she supposed to fill in the rest of the time?  "Do you not feel you have been treated unjustly?" he said.
     "I don't know what you mean, Sir."

(p.298):

     It is morning, and time to get up; and today I must go on with the story.  Or the story must go on with me, carrying me inside it, along the track it must travel, straight to the end, weeping like a train and deaf and single-eyed and locked tight shut; although I hurl myself against the walls of it and scream and cry, and beg to God himself to let me out.
     When you are in themiddle of a story it isn't a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wook; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it.  It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all.  When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

(p.317):

     Grace covers her eyes with a hand, briefly.  "All that time is dark to me, Sir," she says.  "And in any case, there were no gold earrings taken.  I won't say I didn't think of it later, when we were packing up; but having a thought is not the same as doing it.  If we were all on trial for our thoughts, we would all be hanged.

"The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"
  by T.S. Eliot


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky,
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "what is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides long the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions, and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room women come and go,
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "do I dare?', and, 'do I dare?'
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair --
(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!')
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the
Chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
(They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!')
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all--
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days, and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all--
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl,
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

. . . . . . . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired .. or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald)
brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat,
and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'--
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: 'That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.'

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the
Floor--
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
'That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.'

. . . . . . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us and we drown.