Every writer has such a drawer. A repository of miscellaneous fragments, discarded first drafts, odd midnight jottings.  A seed bin. A garden plot starting to sprout. A cabinet of literary curiosities.

I have many such drawers. One is an actual drawer. Another is a wire in-box tray  stacked high with hand-written and printed pages stratified like a geological record, with 21st-century layers near the surface and those from the Pleistocene at the bottom. Another is a pile of pages on the floor next to my desk. Half a dozen others are in electronic files with names like NOTES/IDEAS.doc and MISC-ESS.doc.

Why so many junk drawers? Only one reason I can think of: so I can dig into them now and then and discover something surprising.

Today I pawed around a little and found a few items in storage that will probably never make it into print yet give off some faint scent of promise:

…He nurtures heat and rapture. Exults. Sits smugly in his corner. Wolfs, devours, consumes, splays his bird-of-prey shadow over the earth. Carries his urgency with him like a warm pie or a gift.

…I was having recurring malarial dreams of exploding boxcars and talking animals and daylong sleepwalks punctuated by glimpses of distant mountains so clear and intense that I shuddered as if from electric shocks. Much of that year I didn’t know if I was suffering a profound depression or had been graced with a state of purifying clarity. I remember grasping the hands of strangers at the bus station and being instantly aware of the hidden interconnectedness of us all and of everything around us. We are made of the same molecules that once made maple trees and beachstones and snowflakes and snapdragons and will again. The words we speak today will echo in the ears of a child in Zambia a hundred years from now.

…write an essay on the subject of something situated precariously in an infinity of nothing…

…Researchers studying the stages of sleep labeled 3 and 4, or “deep sleep,” say that electrical waves in the brain “roll as slow as mid-ocean waves.”

…What a young writer at the conference told me: “My dad discovered eBay, and, bye-bye my kid brother’s college fund. If you ever need it we have Marilyn Monroe’s driver’s license, a lock of Mick Jagger’s hair, and a signed copy of every album ever made by Abba.”

…The particular is composed of particles that prove, upon examination, to be general.

…We sat on the riverbank and watched a barge heaped with old trombones and tubas go past. The potential for clamor was great. Then it began raining cast-iron skillets and we ran for our lives.

…They’ll try to convince you that you aren’t smart enough to grasp their mighty explanations, not educated in the proper universities, not read in the officially sanctioned books, not conversant in the consensually accepted vocabulary. In short, that you are a subject of the king’s culture. Tell them to fuck off. We’re the cognoscenti of existence.

…Often I would jerk awake in the night or break off during meals or in the middle of a conversation and rush to write sentences that announced themselves urgently, insistently, unbidden…

…Make a patchwork of words & images. Start with strong subject, place/activity, story, compose companion list of associated or random words, ideas, images. Thus: the arch, a trail as an invitation to a destination, the barred owl’s call, the wind breaking through, the surprise around the corner, the destination and what that means. Now weave it into whole cloth…
But where is the flow? Where is the river of words carving a channel through the world?