“consistency, may i remind you, is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

–Sept 5, 1938, letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman from Shirley Jackson




Our lives are chaos reduced to colorful miscellany:

Jazz club ticket stubs, summer camp pamphlets

Hum of copiers and whoosh of airconditioning

Broken by sudden, sad clickwhirrzizzblats of microfilm
I’m finding again between the pages

Misplaced remnants of the mid-century

Love letters unsent, automatic writing experiments,

Last will and testament of a first generation American
Rewinding again, the pink-shirted young man to my left

Intends to find something in fin-de-siècle German newspapers

On my right, a legal scholar reads Robert Jackson’s Nuremberg notes

At the back of the room librarians mumble over this and that
Contents mis-filed, a torn page, a missing photo

All willing the silent dead to speak.