Listening by Raymond Carver

It was a night like all the others. Empty

of everything save memory. He thought

he'd got to the other side of things.

But he hadn't. He read a little

and listened to the radio. Looked out the window

for a while. Then went upstairs. In bed

realized he'd left the radio on.

But closed his eyes anyway. Inside the deep night,

as the house sailed west, he woke up

to hear voices murmuring. And froze.

Then understood it was only the radio.

He got up and went downstairs. He had

to pee anyway. A little rain

that hadn't been there before was

falling outside. The voices

on the radio faded and then came back

as if from a long way. It wasn't

the same station any longer. A man's voice

said something about Borodin,

and his opera Prince Igor. The woman

he said this to agreed, and laughed.

Began to tell a little of the story.

The man's hand drew back from the switch.

Once more he found himself in the presence

of mystery. Rain. Laughter. History.

Art. The hegemony of death.

He stood there, listening.

from “Where Water Comes Together With Other Water” (1985)

Larson's Holstein Bull by Jim Harrison

Death waits inside us for a door to open.
Death is patient as a dead cat.
Death is a doorknob made of flesh.
Death is that angelic farm girl
gored by the bull on her way home
from school, crossing the pasture
for a shortcut. In the seventh grade
she couldn't read or write. She wasn't a virgin.
She was "simpleminded," we all said.
It was May, a time of lilacs and shooting stars.
She's lived in my memory for sixty years.
Death steals everything except our stories.

from In Search of Small Gods. © Copper Canyon Press, 2009

Sam Shepard-Wyoming (Highway 80 East)

The long haul from Rock Springs to Grand Island, Nebraska, starts out bleak. After two runny eggs and processed ham I hit the road by 7:00. It’s hovering at around nineteen degrees; light freezing snow and piss-poor visibility. Eighteen-wheelers jackknifed all along the high ridges between Rawlins and Laramie. Tow trucks blinking down into the black ravines. Through wisping fog, things loom up at you with chains and hooks and cranes; everyone inching along, afraid to drop off into the wide abyss. Just barely tap the brakes and the whole rear end slides out from underneath you. I’m trying to keep two tires on the shoulder in the chatter strip at about five mph hoping the ice will get dislodged between the treads. Only radio station is a preacher ranting from Paul – something about the body as a tent; “this tent in which we groan”. Same preacher segues into a declaration that, for him, 1961 was the absolute turning point where the whole wide world went sour. I don’t know why he landed on that particular year – 1961 – the very year I first hit the road, but he insists this is the date of our modern dissolution. He has a long list of social indicators beginning with soaring population then family disintegration, moral relaxation, sexual promiscuity, dangerous drugs, the usual litany. But then he counters it with the imperious question: “What must the righteous do?” As though there were an obvious antidote which we all seem to be deliberately ignoring. If we could only turn our backs on this degeneration and strike out for higher ground, we could somehow turn the whole thing around. It seems more political than religious. “What must the righteous do?” An “Onward, Christian Soldiers” kind of appeal. I’ve lost track of the centerline. Snow boring down into the windshield so fast the wipers can’t keep up. Your heart starts to pump a little faster under these conditions; not knowing what might suddenly emerge. Not knowing if the whole world could just drop out from underneath you and there you are at the bottom of crushed steel and spinning wheels. What must the righteous do?

from "Day Out of Days", published in 2010 by Knopf.

Samuel Beckett-Endgame

One day, you'll be blind, like me. You'll be sitting there, a speck in the void, in the dark, for ever, like me.One day you'll say to yourself, I'm tired, I'll sit down, and you'll go and sit down. Then you'll say, I'm hungry, I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up. You'll say, I shouldn't have sat down, but since I have I'll sit on a little longer, and then I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up and you won't get anything to eat.You'll look at the wall awhile, then you'll say, I'll close my eyes, perhaps a little sleep, after that I'll feel better, and you'll close them. And when you open them there'll be no wall anymore.Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn't fill it, and there you'll be, like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe.Yes, one day you'll know what it is, you'll be like me, except that you won't have anyone with you, because you won't have had pity on anyone and because there won't be anyone left to have pity on.

from "Endgame", first performed in French as "Fin De Partie" in 1957. English translation by the author first publisehd in 1958.

A Few Words On The Soul by Wislawa Szymborska

We have a soul at times.

No one’s got it non-stop,

for keeps.

Day after day,

year after year

may pass without it.

Sometimes

it will settle for awhile

only in childhood’s fears and raptures.

Sometimes only in astonishment

that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand

in uphill tasks,

like moving furniture,

or lifting luggage,

or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out

whenever meat needs chopping

or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations

it participates in one,

if even that,

since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,

it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:

it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,

our hustling for a dubious advantage

and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow

aren’t two different feelings for it.

It attends us

only when the two are joined.

We can count on it

when we’re sure of nothing

and curious about everything.

Among the material objects

it favors clocks with pendulums

and mirrors, which keep on working

even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from

or when it’s taking off again,

though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it

but apparently

it needs us

for some reason too.

translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Sam Shepard-Language, Visualization and the Inner Library

Ideas emerge from plays – not the other way around.

Words as tools of imagery in motion. Words as living incantations and not as symbols.

Living, breathing words as they hit the air between the actor and the audience actually possesses the power to change our chemistry.

Language seems to be the only ingridient that retains the potential of making leaps into the unknown.

Language can explode from the tiniest impulse. Words are not thought, they’re felt. They cut through space and make perfect sense without having to hesitate for the “meaning”.

I begin to get the haunting sense that something in me writes but it’s not necessarily me.

The real quest of a writer is to penetrate into another world. A world behind the form.

Myth speaks to everything at once, especially the emotions. By myth I mean a sense of mystery. A character for me is a composite of different mysteries.

Writing is born from a need. A deep burn. If there’s no need, there’s no writing.

The more you write, the harder it gets, becuase you’re not so easily fooled by yourself anymore.

Writing becomes more and more interesting as you go along, and it starts yo open up some of its secrets. One thing I’m sure of, though. I’ll never get to the bottom of it.

excerpted from “Language, Visualization and the Inner Library”, first published in The Drama Review, vol. 21, nº4 (December 1977)

Jim Harrison-Late

What pleasure there is in sitting up on the sofa late at night smoking cigarettes, having a small last drink and petting the dogs, reading Virgil’s sublime “Georgics”, seeing a girl’s bare bottom on TV that you will likely never see again in what they call real life, remembering all the details of when you were captured by the indians at age seven. They gave you time off for good behavior but never truly let you go back to your real world where cars go two ways on the same streets. The doctors will say it’s bad for an old man to stay up late petting his lovely dogs. Meanwhile I look up from Virgil’s farms of ancient Rome and see two women making love in a field of wildflowers. I’m not jealous of their real passion trapped as they are within a television set just as my doctors are trapped within their exhausting days and big incomes that have to be spent. Lighting a last cigarette and sipping my vodka I examine the faces of the sleeping dogs beside me, the improbable mystery of their existence, the short lives they live with an intensity unbearable to us. I have turned to them for their ancient language not my own, being quite willing to give up my language that so easily forgets the world outside itself.

from "In Search of Small Gods", published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010.