That’s the girl, as Grandma Win would say. Put one foot on the first stair, then the other one beside it, like when you were three. You need to take care of yourself, because who else will? There.
He had the freedom of a nobody, with a blank future unrolling before him on which anything at all might be written.
For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts. She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way. She said: Because they won’t want things they can’t have.
His letters always begin without greeting and end without signature, as if they’re part of one single letter, unrolling through time like an endless paper towel.
I am still a coward, still fearful; none of that has changed. But I turn and walk away from her. It’s like stepping off a cliff, believing the air will hold you up. And it does. I see that I don’t have to do what she says, and worse and better, I’ve never had to do what she says. I can do what I like.
We hugged her to us, she was with us in secret, a giggle; she was lava beneath the crust of daily life.
Context is all; or is it ripeness? One or the other.
I can see this idea gathering in Cordelia as well. Maybe she’s gone too far, hit, finally, some core of resistance in me. If I refuse to do what she says this time, who knows where my defiance will end?
The line of her cheek has a marble, a classic, a simplicity; to look at her is to believe that suffering does indeed purify.
Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise.
I know what you mean, we’d say. Or, a quaint expression you sometimes hear, still, from older people: I hear where you’re coming from, as if the voice itself were a traveller, arriving from a distant place. Which it would be, which it is. How.
I have enough daily bread, so I won’t waste time on that. It isn’t the main problem. The problem is getting it down without choking on it.
We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.
I will press this, somewhere. Under the mattress. Leave it there, for the next woman, the one who comes after me, to find. But there’s someone in the room, behind me. I.
Grace and Cordelia and Carol hang around the edges of my life, enticing, jeering, growing paler and paler every day, less and less substantial. I hardly hear them any more because I hardly listen.
One day you will wake up and everything, the stones by the driveway, the brick houses, each brick, each leaf of each tree, your own body, will be glowing from within, lit up, so bright you can hardly look. You will reach out in any direction and you will touch the light itself.
Poems are made of words. They aren’t boxes. They aren’t houses. Nobody is in them, really.
They never knew, about that or why I left. Their own innocence, the reason I couldn’t tell them; perilous innocence, closing them in glass, their articial garden, greenhouse. They didn’t teach us about evil, they didn’t understand about it, how could I describe it to them? They were from another age, prehistoric, when everyone got married and had a family, children growing in the yard like sunowers; remote as Eskimoes or mastodons.
Who controls the women and babies has been a keystone of every repressive regime on the planet.
Everything in this town is retro, which accounts for the large supply of black vintage items in Accessories. The past is so much safer, because whatever’s in it has already happened. It can’t be changed; so, in a way, there’s nothing to dread. She.