Vive in silenzio il Dio che ha purgato questa terra con sale e cenere.
The frailty of everything, revealed at last.
Se solo il mio cuore fosse pietra.
Your kinda weirded out, ain’t ya?
He looked like he was studying something small in the grass.
The razorous shoulder blades sawing under the pale skin.
The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening.
Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease.
Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen near mute with dew. On their chairs in such black immobility these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.
His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel.
But the old woman said that some have no choice. She said that for the poor any choice was a gift with two faces.
If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.
They went on in the perfect blackness, sightless as the blind.
His dreams brightened. The vanished world returned.
What do you say to a man that by his own admission has now soul? Why would you say anything?
Buddy when he come back from up in the panhandle told me one time it quit blowin up there and all the chickens fell over.
This night, thy soul may be required of thee.
It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless Paraclete beleaguered with all limbo’s clamor.
He had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an ill-formed notion of their appearance.
It’s a mystery. A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don’t want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there.