Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht.

Man plans, God laughs.
Yiddish Proverb

Editorial: Think of all the ludicrous demands made by the fickle gods of ancient mythology: sacrifice this virgin, build a boat, fetch me that animal, if you do this you live and if you don’t you die. On and on. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how some events happen in ways that are surprising and even poetic, as if the gods are indeed crazy and indeed have a wicked sense of humor. The impatient man just misses the bus. The composer loses his hearing. The marathoner dies of heart disease. But how is it that the alternative to the gods giving you exactly what you cannot handle is equally vexing: when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers. This means the gods have us suffering coming and going-- when they don’t and do grant our wishes. The fact that both scenarios are coincidences means little to people who tend to fault or credit the divine for everything that occurs in patterns. Either way I certainly enjoy the proverbs and clichés that spring up around their explanation, especially Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht!

Denis Diderot

Everything changes, everything passes. Only the totality remains.
Le Rêve de d’Alembert (D’Alembert’s Dream), 1769

V. S. Naipaul

The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.
A Bend in the River (1979)

Samuel Beckett

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.
'From an Abandoned Work', Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 (ed. S. E. Gontarski), p. 160.

Bob Hicok

As I Was Saying
by Bob Hicok

Long, thin clouds as if the sky were smoking.
I tell it to stop or share, it doesn’t stop or share,
this is what happens to my requests: they rise.
When I was a kid, a neighbor man
had a few and tied a cherry bomb to a pigeon,
it flew furiously until kaboom. Feathers
and bits of what made the pigeon go
landed on the Smitky twins playing hopscotch,
they looked up, I looked at them looking up,
two of everything the same, as if their parents
knew the odds of needing a spare. My wife
wants to fly in a hot-air balloon. I say to her,
I’ll wait here with the turtles. I try to save them
from getting squished when they cross the road.
They don’t know it’s a road or what a road
is for, getting away is what a road is for,
then coming back, then wondering why you came back
is what a road is for. My wife’s people
are Ukrainian, beets are important to them.
I tried to arm-wrestle her father once, he said,
Why would I do that: if I beat your arm,
the rest of you will want revenge.
I never looked at it that way. Forty-two years now
I’ve tried to look at it that way. The other day,
some kids knocked a ball through our window,
one of them asked for it back, I said, Sure,
if you give me the bat. He did, then asked
for the bat, I said, If you give me the ball,
he started to hand it over when I saw understanding
bloom in his face. That never happened for me:
understanding blooming in my face. Not the way
I wanted it to. So I’ll die and someone
will have to deal with what’s left, the body,
the shoes, the socks. The last person on Earth
will just be dead: not buried or mourned
or missed. As with kites, I cut the string
when they’re way up, because who’d want to come back.
So somewhere are all these kites, as somewhere
are all the picture frames from the camps,
and the bows from hair, and the hair itself
I saw once in a museum, some of it, in a room
all its own, as if one day the heads
would come back and think, That’s where I put you,
as I do with keys when I find them in my hand.

The New Yorker, December 8, 2008
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/12/08/081208po_poem_hicok

Edward Hirsch

Self Portrait
by Edward Hirsch

I lived between my heart and my head,
like a married couple who can't get along.

I lived between my left arm, which is swift
and sinister, and my right, which is righteous.

I lived between a laugh and a scowl,
and voted against myself, a two-party system.

My left leg dawdled or danced along,
my right cleaved to the straight and narrow.

My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation,
my right stood upright as a Roman soldier.

Let's just say that my left side was the organ
donor and leave my private parts alone,

but as for my eyes, which are two shades
of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo.

Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow
while Adam puts his right foot down.

No one expected it to survive,
but divorce seemed out of the question.

I suppose my left hand and my right hand
will be clasped over my chest in the coffin

and I'll be reconciled at last,
I'll be whole again.

Special Orders: Poems (Knopf 2008)

William Matthews

The Four Subjects of Poetry
by William Matthews

1. I went out into the woods today, and it made me feel, you know, sort of religious.
2. We're not getting any younger.
3. It sure is cold and lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey.
4. Sadness seems but the other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too soon spent, and on what we know not what.

George Orwell

The vote was taken at once, and it was agreed by an overwhelming majority that rats were comrades. There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.
Animal Farm (1945), Chapter 1

Noam Chomsky

When I'm driving, I sometimes turn on the radio and I find very often that what I'm listening to is a discussion of sports. These are telephone conversations. People call in and have long and intricate discussions, and it's plain that quite a high degree of thought and analysis is going into that. People know a tremendous amount. They know all sorts of complicated details and enter into far-reaching discussion about whether the coach made the right decision yesterday and so on. These are ordinary people, not professionals, who are applying their intelligence and analytic skills in these areas and accumulating quite a lot of knowledge and, for all I know, understanding. On the other hand, when I hear people talk about, say, international affairs or domestic problems, it's at a level of superficiality which is beyond belief. In part, this reaction may be due to my own areas of interest, but I think it's quite accurate, basically. And I think that this concentration on topics such as sports makes a certain degree of sense. The way the system is set up, there is virtually nothing people can do anyway, without a degree of organization that's far beyond anything that exists now, to influence the real world. They might as well live in a fantasy world, and that's in fact what they do.
The Chomsky Reader (1987, p. 33)

William Faulkner

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.
Unsourced

Salvatore Quasimodo

[Untitled]
by Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968)

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.

Everyone stands alone at the heart of the earth
transfixed by a ray of sun:
and suddenly it is evening.

William Shakespeare

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth, Act V, Scene v.
Day after day after day. The days go slowly, up to the end of time. All the days in the past did no good except to bring fools through their lives up to the times of their deaths. Get blown out, flame of life! Life is short. Life is only a walking shadow. Life is only a poor actor, who walks around on the stage for a short time, and after that no one hears him any more. Life is a story that an idiot tells, full of sound and fury, but not meaning anything.
http://simple.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare

Theodore Roethke

The Meadow Mouse
by Theodore Roethke

1
In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking
Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,
Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick
Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in,
Cradled in my hand,
A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,
His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,
His feet like small leaves,
Little lizard-feet,
Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,
Wriggling like a minuscule puppy.

Now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his
bottle-cap watering-trough--
So much he just lies in one corner,
His tail curled under him, his belly big
As his head; his bat-like ears
Twitching, tilting toward the least sound.

Do I imagine he no longer trembles
When I come close to him?
He seems no longer to tremble.

2

But this morning the shoe-box house on the back porch is empty.
Where has he gone, my meadow mouse,
My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm?--
To run under the hawk's wing,
Under the eye of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,
To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat.

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,
The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,
The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,--
All things innocent, hapless, forsaken.

Abraham Lincoln

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!
September 30, 1859, 'Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin'.

Brad Leithauser

Old Globe
by Brad Leithauser

For her big birthday
we gave her (nothing less would do)
the world, which is to say

a globe copyrighted the very year
she was born—ninety years before.
She held it tenderly, and it was clear

both had come such a long way:
the lovely, dwindled, ever-eager-to-please
woman whose memory had begun to fray

and a planet drawn and redrawn through
endless shifts of aims and loyalties,
and war and war.

*

Her eye fell at random. "Formosa," she read.
"Now that's pretty. Is it there today?"
A pause. "It is," my brother said,

"though now it's called Taiwan."
She looked apologetic. "I sometimes forget..."
"Like Sri Lanka," I added. "Which was Ceylon."

And so my brothers and I, globe at hand, began:
which places had seen a change of name
in the last ninety years? Burma, Baluchistan,

Czechoslovakia, Abyssinia, Transjordan, Tibet.
Because she laughed, we extended our game
into history, mist: Vineland, Persia, Cathay...

*

She was in a middle place—
her fifties—when photos were first transmitted,
miraculously, from outer space.

Who could believe those men—in their black noon—
got up like robots, wandering the wild
wastelands of the moon,

and overheard a wholly naked sun
and an Earth so far away
it was less real than this one,

the gift received today—
the globe she'd so tenderly fitted
under her arm, like a child.

*

Finally, there's cake: nine candles in a ring.
...Just so, the past turns distant past,
each rich decade diminishing

to a little stick of wax, rapidly
expiring. I say, "Now make a wish before
you blow them out." She says, "I don't see—"

stops. Then mildly protests: "But they look so nice."
We laugh at her—and wince when a look of doubt
or fear clouds her face; she needs advice.

Well—what should anyone wish for
in blowing candles out
but that the light might last?

Jorge Luis Borges

There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.
The Immortal, 1949

Gabriel García Márquez

Let no one be deceived, no, thinking that what he awaits will last longer than what he has seen.
Memories of My Melancholy Whore

Ecclesiastes

That thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
King James Version

Barbara Kingsolver

She tried to put aside the misery of thinking too much.
Prodigal Summer

Chad Gifford

Poisonwood
by Chad Gifford

Fire at dawn, blaze on.
Horizon, sun rise.
That che-chem itch.