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Fishing, if I a fisher may protest, Of pleasures is the sweetest, of sports the best, Of exercises the most excellent. Of recreations the most innocent. But now the sport is marred, and what, ye, why? Fishes decrease, and fishers multiply.

Sextus upon a spleen, did rashly swear, That no new fashion he would ever wear. He was forsworn, for see what did ensue, He wore the old, till the old was the new.

God’s name is bare of honour in our hearing, And even worn out with our blasphemous swearing. Between the infant and the aged, both The first and last they utter, is an oath. Oh hellish manners of our profane age. Jehovah’s fear is scoffed upon the stage, The Mimicking jester, names it every day; Unless God is blashphem’d, it is no play.

Methinks 'tis pretty sport to hear a child, Rocking a word in mouth yet undefiled. The tender racket rudely plays the sound, Which weakly banded cannot back rebound, And the soft air the softer roof does kiss, With a sweet dying and a pretty miss, Which hears no answer yet from the white rank Of teeth, not risen from their coral bank. The alphabet is searched for letters soft, To try a word before it can be wrought, And when it slides forth, it goes as nice, As when a man does walk upon the ice.

Our vice runs beyond all that old men saw, And far authentically above our laws, And scorning virtues safe and golden mean, Sits uncontrolled upon the high extreme. Circes, thy monsters painted out the hue, Of feigned filthiness, but ours is true. Our vice puts down all proverbs and all themes, Our vice excels all fables and all dreams.

Nature which headlong into life doth throw us, With our feet forward to our grave doth bring us, What is less ours, than this our borrowed breath, We stumble into life, we go to death.

Age is deformed, youth unkind, We scorn their bodies, they our mind.

It’s mostly someone long dead who gets curious all over again, who once told a book, the book picked clean to glow on a website now, an address with double slashes in it. Suddenly I love one detail: the way they harnessed horses or hammered copper, what seed — cardamom, rye — kept its small heart aloft for a millennium. Voices in that dark ago when I open to room light, lamp or window on book — old friend — or the new computer screen. It’s not technology, either way. It’s something in the brain first, an inkling.Not yet yours to know.

One man prays: How shall I be able to lie with this woman? Do thou pray thus: How shall I not desire to lie with her? Another prays thus: How shall I be released from this? Another prays: How shall I not desire to be released? —Marcus Aurelius When we are lost in our longings, Aurelius, already it is too late: there is already nothing we can do. I have rarely desired an end to my desires. We are so in love with our wanting. Last week, though doctors were quick to repair it, a baby in India was born grasping her own beating heart in her fist. Today, a Dumpster arrives from Dave’s Trash Removal & I begin to fill it. I toss in a transistor radio that hasn’t worked in years. A man walking past asks if he can take it. Later, he returns & carries off a broken TV. A neighbor salvages the dented gray fuse box; a girl wants a window, a paper bag full of tangled cords. All night I listen to the wind & the echoes of feet kicking through rubbish, like a mouse nesting inside a drum. My older brother is dead a decade. Yet here in its enormous gold frame is the familiar, pastel portrait someone named Maxwell drew for our mother, an inaccurate rendering of the two of us when we were small. I can’t look at it; I can’t throw it away.Every change is a death, you tell yourself, turn thy thoughts now to thy life as a child. . . . One day, I tell myself, I will shut all the doors, leave everything behind. The museum is showing a hundred tricked-out Victorian photographs of that other world: the hoax of floating fairies, women haunted by ghostly blurs. Another century & still we want to believe in what we know cannot be true. Your words, Aurelius, have found me, but you could not. If we are disappointed, we have only ourselves to blame:Wipe out thy imagination. We fill our hands when they are empty. We empty ourselves when we have held too much too long.

Near the end of my searching I came to a door. Entering, I found the story of her life, laid out like a cake on an ebony table, as if waiting there for the lost bride—pages flat and placid, blank as a lake asleep in winter. Hoping for answers, some knowledge of her, perhaps—I’m not sure what— I placed my palm upon the surface. It sank through and disappeared beneath a cloud of snowy powder.