The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

by Denis Johnson

You repent the things you’ve done, and regret the chances you let get away.

felt the ecstasy of a dancer, but I kept still.

I note that I’ve lived longer in the past, now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past stays, and I wouldn’t mind forgetting a lot more of it. Once in a while I lie there, as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folk tales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish, and pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again. Then sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse.

I’ve got about a dozen hooks in my heart, I’m following the lines back to where they go.

I’m a fujiyama mama and I’m just about to blow my top. and when I start erupting I don’t know when I’m ever gonna stop

Dear Satan I did not enjoy it at your Jamboree last night

1967. Pets and children wandered loose in the streets. Respected citizens threw their litter anywhere. As for us lawbreakers, we lit our smokes on a pushbutton electric hotwire bolted to the cellblock wall. Donald Dundun

Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light. It’s not much different, really, from filming a parade of clouds across the sky and calling it a movie—although it has to be admitted that the clouds can descend, take you up, carry you to all kinds of places, some of them terrible, and you don’t get back where you came from for years and years.

This was the kind of moment when, in the distant past, I’d put a cigarette between my lips and light up and take a drag—but I don’t smoke now—in order not to seem stupefied.

Floating above the house, the buzzards looked no more substantial than burning pages, gliding very gradually downward but then, after no perceptible alteration or adjustment, gliding upward, mounting high enough to seem no longer invested in the scene below,

It doesn’t matter. The world keeps turning. It’s plain to you that at the time I write this, I’m not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.

Nicanor Parra

I measured the balcony’s railing with the thought of hopping over. It seemed the quickest exit. Here’s what you say when you screw up like this: “I might be mixing up two or three subjects. I’ll shut up.”