- I have spent weeks in the desert, forgetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of preoccupation.
- Her father had taught her about hands. About a dog's paws. Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of wonder: the smell of it never suggested dirt. It's a cathedral! her father had said, so-and-so's garden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen - a concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day.
- He walked through sandstorms with this coat of bottles, his ears plugged with two other small corks so he seemed a vessel to himself, this merchant doctor, this king of oils and perfumes and panaceas, this baptist.
- With the uncorking of each tiny bottle the perfumes fell out. There was an odour of the sea. The smell of rust. Indigo. Ink. River-mud arrow-wood formaldehyde paraffin ether.
- [...] her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.
- Doors opened into landscape. Some rooms had become an open aviary.
- Whatever was wet escaped burning during that April of 1945.
- But now there is hardly a world around them and they are forced back on themselves.
- [...] a tower leaning like a person in shell shock.
- Those who weep lose more energy than they lose during any other act.
- [...] she stilled herself as if she could be camouflaged by stillness.
- The deepest sorrow, he thought. Where the only way to survive is to excavate everything.
- Sometimes she collects several blankets and lies under them, enjoying them more for their weight than for the warmth they bring.
- . . . slow twilight
- She wanted air that smelled of nothing human, wanted moonlight even if it came with a rainstorm.
- . . . her mind skating
- [...] seasons that seemed archaic, that sat like old gentlemen throughout the war.
- Her body had been in a war and, as in love, it had used every part of itself.
- I know death now, David. I know all the smells, I know how to diver them from agony. When to give the quick jolt of morphine in a major vein. The saline solution. To make them empty their bowels before they die. Every damn general should have had my job. Every damn general. It should have a prerequisite for any river crossing. Who the hell were we to be given this responsibility, expected to be wise as old priests, to know how to lead people towards something no one wanted and somehow make them comfortable. I could never believe in all those services they gave for the dead. Their vulgar rhetoric. How dare they! How dare they talk like that about a human being dying.
- . . . the hopscotch of keys
- The brushing of teeth, since he was a child, has always been for him an outdoor activity.
- I love the word "curl", such a slow word, you can't rush it ...
- We'll bathe at brighton; / the fish we'll frighten / when we're in. / Your bathing suit so thin / will make the shellfish grin / fin to fin.
- The trees make a sieve of moonlight [...]
- [...] so he writes words down wrong, the pen sprawling as if without spine.
- To fall in love and be disassembled.
- A unison of performance like a handful of thrown seed.
- "Madox what is the name of that hallow at the base of a woman's neck? At the front. Here. What is it, does it have an official name? That hallow about the size of an impress of your thumb."
apr 18 2012 ∞
apr 18 2012 +
apr 18 2012 +