The painter who wanted more money because he was greedy. Or the painter who wanted more money because he knew his worth.
Galleries are not much like life. They are such clean places, generally.
Life? was what you worked to catch, the intense happiness of an object slightly set apart from you.
H has moved to a town in Denmark that sounds like someone Scottish saying the word whorehouse.
And after that, I watched our house collapse in on itself and I spent some time lying in the rubble. Then I vanished completely. I wasn’t here at all. Then you phoned.
Then she told George that the story of the minotaur was one about facing what mazes you. She made it very clear that she was using the word maze, not amaze. Then, when you’d faced it, she said, the thing to do to get out of the labyrinth was to go back the way you’d come, follow your own thread, the thread you’d left behind you, and that this had a lot to do with knowing where we come from and what our roots are –.
I don’t know that I believe in gods enough to ask of them. But if they exist and I might be so bold as to say, excuse me, if you’re there can you please make that sunlit summer day longer and these dark days shorter.
What if the girl says. Instead of saying, this border divides places. We said, this border holds together two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible.
We move from one invisibility to another.
A book should be an axe to break the frozen sea inside you.
Reason not the need, the man says. Need not the reason.
You can’t just ask strangers to drive you up and down the country. This is the twenty first century. Strangers are more dangerous than ever; we’ve never been more dangerous.
I have a vision that the modern sense of being a hero is like shining a bright light on things that need to be seen.
Poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, under unbearable duress, and only with the hope that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.
A prison is a prison, he says. Whatever you fill the time with.
Maybe coincidence never means the way you want it to. Because if it did it wouldn’t be coincidence, would it?
We’re always looking for the full open leaf, the open warmth, the promise that we’ll one day soon surely be able to lie back and have summer done to us; one day soon we’ll be treated well by the world.
Whatever age you are, he says. You still die young.
I’m rubble too, he thinks. Just in a different form. The whole world and all its people. Rubble.
But love was terribly important. She didn’t mean romantic love. Generalized sort of love.