The River Twice Quotes

“Isn’t that a sign? Everyone on board has passed
through security, has been patted down by the rhetoric
of terror, of scrutiny, of surveillance, of suspicion.
The rhetoric of color, I mean literal color, the widest
implications of red, white, & blue. The rhetoric of orange,
of high alert. The rhetoric of scent, of bomb sniffing,
of plants, an eco-­rhetoric, the rhetoric of the molecular
fingerprint. The rhetoric of brown.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“When you drive up later,
how happy you will be to see our other neighbor
has replaced the Confederate flag hanging in his yard
with one with snowflakes & a cardinal”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“I could be at any moment—like the woman
killed with one clean shot while walking her retriever—
mistaken for something wilder than I am”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“We all care about survival.
We all know helplessness & grief. Recognize grace.
A rhetoric of persistence, assistance, charity, catastrophe,
epidemic. The rhetoric that inoculates or will not be
inoculated. A rhetoric that resists change & a rhetoric
that resists the resistance. Rhetoric, colonizing,
decolonizing, universal, unique, moving toward category
collapse, toward a reconstruction of gender & race,
ability, disability, that is ever more inter, hybrid, trans.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“At any moment, we might hear someone proclaim,
The truth is not the truth.
Though it must be. Though we have to live
as though it is.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“Sometimes, I can almost imagine

America as an idea I can address directly, as in America, you, too,
must sometimes feel like an imperfectly grafted hothouse flower.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“When I look for a long minute

into the face of my dog, I know there is another world—
immediate, un-­languaged—into which I cannot travel.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“How tired I am of death & how tired I am of flailing against it.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“I walk from one room in the house to another & the dog follows.
Sometimes
when I sit, he sits beside me, puts his wide paw on my knee—his devotion,

a heavy gift.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“America, I am telling you this because
I would like to feel warm. Enough is
enough. Perhaps the cure is not to say
everything but rather to say each day
one small thing we have only just now
discovered we had forgotten we knew.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“And now that I am middle-­aged,
I have no idea why my parents didn’t get along.
Why each of us seems to wake some mornings
asking, Why can’t I just do whatever I want?”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“Perhaps
we relearn daily to endure what we cannot change.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“We have
folded another day’s complicated news & wonder
whether it might not yet be possible for pure ineptitude
to save us all—both from those sorrows that seem
almost unremarkable & all the others that do not.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“Praise that it does not hurt
more than it does, that it is bearable, to be
a rusted link in a busted chain.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“Sometimes I lift the old blue paperback

of Common Wild Flowers & read from it a litany of the words
for the world we have been given by those who came before:
Keck & Traveller’s Joy. Violet. Primrose. Nightshade, Nettle,

Shepherd’s-­purse. Honeysuckle, Broom.
If to name is an act
of owning, perhaps to list is to spend or to sow. Profligate.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“How common

the belief that each of us matters. How unfathomable the fact
that our urgent being ends.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“It’s simple: We’d rather set out in the dark than arrive
there. If wisdom is a myth, it is one of the better ones.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“Tomorrow, may we
all be on a beach, sipping something sweet from a coconut, our flesh tuned
for pleasure, the dazzled body churning out a warehouse of vitamin D.
But, of course, most of us aren’t that type.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“On Saturday, the neighborhood women
wrap whatever they can spare in blankets & carry it
to the park to set out on the grass to sell. One week
they call their plan How to Pay for Electricity.
The next, they say, Let's Try to Fill the Car
with Gas. Not because Economic Sustainability
is a less catchy name for a fast horse than Joie
de Vivre, but because there are limits to our means.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“I tell myself I'm not interested in being anyone, though
I caught myself admitting over breakfast that the problem
with mortality is that I will genuinely miss myself
when I'm gone.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“I find it easy

to both believe & not believe that I think; therefore I am.

To imagine that this might be the one & only day--reality

intricately folded, everything always still infinitely possible,
even though we cannot yet grasp how.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“Soon I will take off even my skin.

And each loved thing will be lovingly held by someone
I have never met. This is, of course, the best-case scenario.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“Today, everyone has come to see the horses, who have been here
for four hundred years. In myth, they descend from a herd
brought on a Spanish galleon & swim ashore to their astonishing
freedom after the ship hits a sandbar in a storm & goes down.
America, this is a scene you have seen before: a dark hull of flesh.
Or they are the descendants of horses set out by farmers to graze
& inexplicably forgotten. You are an assemblage. Natural.
Unnatural. So little of you is not from somewhere else.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“Rolling the plastic can to the curb in pink light, she
imagines she might be the only person left alive--surprised that the
thought is not unbearable, surprised by how peculiarly her solitude has
tuned her.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“When my brother was failing, his wife roamed the ward
wild-eyed & inconsolable. It's not what it seems,
she whispered when she thought no one could hear.
His cells are regenerating. Tomorrow he'll open
his eyes and be fine. The day he died a surgeon
offered to install a system of shunts that would not
have saved him. They would, however, have drained
the fluid collecting around his heart. My brother
had left papers that said I should be the decider.
America, sometimes all options are poor options.
He died before anything more could happen.
That is all I remember. I have no idea what I said.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“The problem with life is that everyone who dies
really dies.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“America, I would like to get closer to you, but
you are the unconscious patient. One hundred interns
bicker this morning above your bed.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“I try to tell myself

none of this could have been any better than it was: the merely
imagined, some uncontainable churn, always richer than the known.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“The only living things in sight
were the little sandpipers & the black-headed laughing gulls,

through the wrack line glittered with flotsam: waxy garlands
we called sea snakes--whose pouches contained hundreds of tiny whelks--

& the cracked armature of the prehistoric horseshoe crabs, barnacles
fastened to their burnished backs & tails.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems

“I stare into the immensity, half-thinking
I am executing some moral obligation to stand on the Earth

as consciously as I can for as long as I am able.”
― Kathleen Graber, The River Twice: Poems