More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
As if this big dangerous animal is also a part of me, that somewhere inside the delicate skin of my body, there pumps an 8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood.
I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.
If you walk long enough, your crowded head clears, like how all the cattle run off loudly as you approach.
The great heavy chest of live animals I had been dragging around for years; what’s life?
I imagine what it must be like to stay hidden, disappear in the dusky nothing and stay still in the night. It’s not sadness, though it may sound like it. I’m thinking about people and trees and how I wish I could be silent more, be more tree than anything else, less clumsy and loud, less crow, more cool white pine, and how it’s hard not to always want something else, not just to let the savage grass grow.
The dog does this beautiful thing, it waits. It stills itself and determines that the waiting is essential. I suppose this eternity is the one inside the drawer, inside the buttonhole.
It means, if you’re alone, when love is all around, We all tip our lonely hats in one un-lonely sound.
But I want to feel the exchange, the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out and the ear holding on to it.
the sugar maple throw down its winged seeds like the tree wants to give us something too— some sweet goodness that’s so hard to take.
I’m learning so many different ways to be quiet. There’s how I stand in the lawn, that’s one way. There’s also how I stand in the field across from the street, that’s another way because I’m farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There’s how I don’t answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I’m not home when people knock. There’s daytime silent when I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There’s shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there’s the silence
...more
I haven’t given up on trying to live a good life, a really good one even, sitting in the kitchen in Kentucky, imagining how agreeable I’ll be— the advance of fulfillment, and of desire— all these needs met, then unmet again.
I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong. Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented the contentment of the field. Why must we practice this surrender? What I mean is: there are days I still want to kill the carrots because I can.
All of this seemed really far off and not like us at all, so we ordered another beer and said, Life is long.
so I ask T to tell me what to write about, she says, Saturation, and I think of that feeling when you’re really full, or life is full and you can’t think of anything else that could fit in it, but then even more sky comes and more days and there is so much to remember and swallow.
But love is impossible and it goes on despite the impossible.
You’re the muscle I cut from the bone and still the bone remembers, still it wants (so much, it wants) the flesh back, the real thing, if only to rail against it, if only to argue and fight, if only to miss a solve-able absence.
I’ve been a long time worried about grasping infinity and coaxing some calm out of the softest part of the pins and needles of me.
I want to be the rough clothes you can’t sleep in.
It’s hard to believe we didn’t know that before; it’s hard to believe we were so hollowed out, so drained, only so we could shine a little harder when the light finally came.
How good it is to love live things, even when what they’ve done is terrible, how much we each want to be the pure exonerated creature, to be turned loose into our own wide open without a single harness of sin to stop us.
If you live, you look back and beg for it again, the hazardous bliss before you know what you would miss.
something that loves itself so much it moves across the boundaries of death to touch itself once more, to praise both divided sides equally, as if it was easy.
We rubbed his long horse nose, his marble eyes turning to take us all in, to inhale us, to accept our now-selves and he was older, a wise, hoofed, grizzled, equine elder and I thought, this was what it was to be blessed— to know a love that was beyond an owning, beyond the body and its needs, but went straight from wild thing to wild thing, approving of its wildness.
When the plane went down in San Francisco, I thought of my friend M. He’s obsessed with plane crashes. He memorizes the wrecked metal details, the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke. Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes: The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa. How people go on, and how people don’t. It was almost a year before I learned that his brother was a pilot. I can’t help it, I love the way men love.
I imagine the insides of myself sometimes— part female, part male, part terrible dragon. What I saw in the men who came before, sometimes I don’t want to say this out loud, was someone I could hold up to my ear and hear the ocean, something I could say my name into, and have it returned in the inky waves. *
I’m not afraid of hate anymore. What do we do with grief? Lug it; lug it.
I had to come to terms with how they loved, that they loved. I couldn’t cut it out of me.
I thought after the first stab, I’d learn to take it, but even now, I hold the hot blade in the mouth in case anyone comes to destroy the bloom.
See? The knife I carry? It cuts my smile even wider.
or what new night might leave us hungry and reeling, we were simply going forward, riotous and windswept, and all too willing to be struck by something shining and mad, and so furiously hot it could kill us.
It didn’t matter what worlds they were under, what language, what depth of water divided, the song went on and on. What I mean is: none of this is chaos. Immigration, cross the river, the blood of us. It goes like this: water, land, water. Like a waltz.
I am in no hurry to stop believing we are supposed to sway like this, that we too are immense and calling out.
How masterful and mad is hope.
what we see when we stare long enough into nothing.
Sometimes, you just want something so hard you have to lie about it, so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute, how real hunger has a real taste.
What was it I wanted? The captain to sail safely? To land alive and, like survival, loved?
Wickedness has leaked into the home I made, and I want to burn it down. Sister, tell me how you stand the murderous fury. You there still singing, I crave demolishing, to eat explosives. How could I have imagined this? Mortal me, brutal disaster born out of so much greed.
