Minute by minute, a day passed.
I think about seventy percent of my depression was my seventeenth-century warrior trying to get out.
They dance together in a line, murmuring in swift, low voices, smiling carefully as they are too proud to give away their beauty. They are light steppers with a gravity of sure grace.
In Erling Nicolai Rolfsrud’s compendium of memorable women and men from North Dakota, “Mustache” Maude Black, for that was the name of my grandparents’ benefactress, is described as not un-womanly, though she dressed mannishly, smoked, drank, was a crack shot and a hard-assed camp boss. These.
Where will you be my darling, the last time it snows on earth?
So I was, like most artists, deformed by my art.
Where are we bound? Is it any different, in fact, from where we were going in the first place? Perhaps all of creation from the coddling moth to the elephant was just a grandly detailed thought that God was engrossed in elaborating upon, when suddenly God fell asleep. We are an idea, then. Maybe God has decided that we are not an idea worth thinking anymore.
What I am doing now is for the future, though it may seem small, or trivial, or boring, to you.
He was not all good, would never be; yet there were slender threads of okay.
How come we’ve got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs. I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud. I’ll get past the ragged leaves that dead bum of my youth looked into. I’ll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.
Our individual consciousnesses were sieves of the divine. We could only know what our minds could encompass safely.
I have never seen the truth,” said Damien, “without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy.
Hildegarde stood, scratched her nose, an act for which she must later say a penance.
It was Sister Hildegarde’s belief that good penmanship was the defining key to success in life.
It was as though her soul were neatly removed by a drinking straw and siphoned into the green pool of quiet that lay beneath the rippling cascade of notes.
Nector got even by the use of penmanship.
At any rate those two, one the shadow of a shadow in the hall and the other a shadow also, an imitation of the ruthless man who’d stolen from the world with careless ease, both poised, caught in time.
The whiskey had its own mind. Or spirit, he said. A cunning spirit. Sometimes it fooled him. Sometimes it set him free.
In the darkness, she wound herself into the blanket still more tightly. She was swaddled, confined, protected from herself – as in a very exclusively privately run mental hospital devoted solely to the care of one person: Nola. She fell asleep bothered only by the nagging thought that she would have to start all over in the morning. Existence whined in her head like a mosquito. Then she swatted it. Rode the tide of her comfort down into the earth.
I don’t know why they want me here on earth, the little rocks. I don’t know why they care about me as they do. I only know that by the time I reached the tree I had no choice but to fling the rope away from myself. I turned back, my fingers rubbing the little agate. All the way back to the store not a single rock slipped underfoot.