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He returns to her back, until his wrists ache, and flops from astride his mermaid truly weary, as if under a sea-spell to sleep.
and closes his eyes on the food of her again;
The body lacks voice to sing its own song.
With her help their blind loins fit. Something sad in the capture.
and her breathing snags on something sharp.
she wants, impossible, to turn inside out;
She feels transparent; he sees her heart.
He looks in her face and seems to read in its shadows an expression of forgiveness, as if she knows that at the moment of release, the root of love, he betrayed her by feeling despair.
“Oh. It’s like falling through.”
Wonderful, women, from such hungry wombs to such amiable fat. Best bedfriend, fucked woman. Bowl bellies.
Its childish brightness comes from years away.
He loves hearing this; pleasure spins along his nerves, making him feel immense. But American modesty has been drilled into him, and “the will to achievement” glides out of his mouth, which he tries to make look lopsided.
Across from him her broad pelvis, snug in a nubbly brown skirt, is solid and symmetrical as the base of a powerful column. His heart rises through that strong column and, enraptured to feel his love for her founded anew yet not daring to lift his eyes to the test of her face, he says, “I can’t help it. You’re such good news.”
The breath of steam is a whisper in a tomb.
As a shark nudges silent creases of water ahead of it, the gray fender makes ripples of air that break against the back of Rabbit’s knees.
“Poor thing” is one word on his lips, worn smooth.
He must try to stop swearing; he wonders why he’s doing it. To keep them apart, maybe; he feels a dangerous tug drawing him toward this man.
Eccles will take it in with the same weary smoke; he is a listener by trade. His big fair head must be stuffed with a gray mash of everybody’s precious secrets and passionate questions, a mash that nothing, young as he is, can color. For the first time, Rabbit dislikes him.
Rabbit knows he should run, but the thought of a game, and an idea that it’s safest to see the hunter, make resistance.
Funny, the world just can’t touch you once you follow your instincts.
“I made you bloom,” he says.
knowing his attempts to explain will amuse her, for shapeless reasons.
But the city is huge in the middle view, and he opens his lips as if to force the lips of his soul to receive the taste of the truth about it, as if truth were a secret in such low solution that only immensity can give us a sensible taste. Air dries his mouth.
where words hang like caterpillar nests that can’t be burned away.
Sun and moon, sun and moon, time goes.
He loves folding the hoed ridge of crumbs of soil over the seeds. Sealed, they cease to be his. The simplicity. Getting rid of something by giving it to itself. God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Self-destined to a succession of explosions, the great slow gathering out of water and air and silicon: this is felt without words in the turn of the round hoe-handle in his palms.
Children and dogs sense the invisible.
just to keep sealed shut the great hole that is threatening to pull open inside of her again. She takes just a sip and it’s like a swallow of a light that makes everything clear.
What kind of second-rate grief is it that permits them to walk? The sense of their thick bodies just going on, wrapping their hearts in numbness and small needs, angers him.
Why was he set down here; why is this particular ordinary town for him the center and index of a universe that contains great prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of “any place,” prelude to the ultimate, “Why am I me?”—re-ignites panic in his heart.
Janice’s tears have come as gently as dew comes;
Water hesitates on his lids and then runs down his cheeks; the wetness is delicious. He wishes he could cry for hours, for just this tiny spill relieves him. But a man’s tears are grudging and his stop before they are out of the apartment.
Immersed in hate he doesn’t have to do anything; he can be paralyzed, and the rigidity of hatred makes a kind of shelter for him.
He can feel each bite hit a scraped floor inside.
but with his mother there’s no question of liking him they’re not even in a way separate people he began in her stomach and if she gave him life she can take it away and if he feels that withdrawal it will be the grave itself.
His mother had been propelled by the instinct that makes us embrace those we wound, and then she had felt this girl in her arms as a woman like her and then had sensed that she too, having restored her son to himself, must be deserted.
The angular words walk in Harry’s head like clumsy blackbirds; he feels their possibility.
It is as if at first the tears are everywhere about him, a sea, and that at last the saltwater gets into his eyes.
his heart swims in loss, that had skimmed over it before, dives deeper and deeper into the limitless volume of loss.
As a kid he often went up through the woods. But maybe as a kid he walked under a protection that has now been lifted;
A dirty knife turns in his intricate inner darkness.
The way she is fighting for control of herself repels him; he doesn’t like people who manage things. He likes things to happen of themselves.
Ruth has parents, and she will let his baby live; two thoughts that are perhaps the same thought, the vertical order of parenthood, a kind of thin tube upright in time in which our solitude is somewhat diluted. Ruth and Janice both have parents: on this excuse he dissolves them both. Nelson remains: here is a hardness he must carry with him.
the thought that he doesn’t know seems to make him infinitely small and impossible to capture. Its smallness fills him like a vastness. It’s like when they heard you were great and put two men on you and no matter which way you turned you bumped into one of them and the only thing to do was pass. So you passed and the ball belonged to the others and your hands were empty and the men on you looked foolish because in effect there was nobody there.
