At some point the talk got heated, and Paolo called Mother a strumpet, for which Daddy was said to have stomped a serious mudhole in Paolo’s ass.
Your mother rolls her eyes at the cat lapping grapefruit juice, says, Everything that comes into this house is crazy – whether we choose them for that or they get that way, I don’t know.
Every day I feel more like some defeated matador limping out of the arena after I’ve been gored, or like some general coming back from a long battle.
Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else’s suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.
Faith is a choice like any other. If you’re picking a career or a husband – or deciding whether to have a baby – there are feelings and reasons pro and con out the wazoo. But thinking it through is – at the final hour – horse dookey. You can only try out.
Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild...
Even the best of us are at least part-time bastards.
That’s what’s so gorgeous about humanity. It doesn’t matter how bleak our daily lives are, we still fight for the light. I think that’s our divinity. We lean into love, even in the most hideous circumstances. We manage to hope.
If dysfunction means that a family doesn’t work, then every family ambles into some arena in which that happens, where relationships get strained or even break down entirely. We fail each other or disappoint each other. That goes for parents, siblings, kids, marriage partners – the whole enchilada.
The words and sentences you take into your body from books are no less sacred and healing than communion. Surely at least one such person lives in your zip code.
Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody’s head off.
In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech – the only prayers said.
I find a great deal of comfort and care in my faith and prayer. I’d sooner do without air than prayer.
Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.
When I got sober, I thought giving up was saying goodbye to all the fun and all the sparkle, and it turned out to be just the opposite. That’s when the sparkle started for me.
Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we’re formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.
Ten years, she’s dead, and I still find myself some mornings reaching for the phone to call her. She could no more be gone than gravity or the moon.
I don’t think I look like the pope’s favorite Catholic – at least not under close scrutiny.
I believe in God, but even if you don’t, you can believe in a self, the person who is innately who you are. Once you fully become that person, then everything you do will be blessed.
I’m bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A’s you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable because Lord knows they’ll try – without let up – to break you.