Tim Lilburn > Quotes

“One afternoon, disgusted, bravo, you fall asleep.”
― Tim Lilburn, Moosewood Sandhills

“All knowing darkens as it builds.
The grass is a mirror that clouds as the bright look goes in.
You stay in the night, you squat in the hills in the cave of night. Wait.
Above, luminous rubble, torn webs of radio signals.
Below, stone scrapers, neck bone of a deer, salt beds.
The world is ending.”
― Tim Lilburn, Moosewood Sandhills

“Forget, too, the lamb-y, metaphor-male, the groinless, bourgeois Jesus,
with his Easter-egg, candy-store-window eyes
ogling the cruciform crosspiece of his eyebrows.
If you meet such a Christ on the way,
kill him.
Do you wish to love? Do you wish to love?
Leave love. Love nothing.
Life is dark; life is dark at the no-place
of the shocked heart cut two by the bone-handled, thrice-bladed Word.”
― Tim Lilburn, Tourist to ecstasy

“Snow falls in the Moosewood Sandhills, on ghost
burrows, deer woods, in the bone-home,
last snow.
What does it mean to become nothing?
You've dug a cave in the earth,
room of knowing, room of tears.
It means to place yourself beneath irrational things
and know they are without blame.
The potato smell of the dark.
You've given up.”
― Tim Lilburn, Moosewood Sandhills

“You were chased here by darkness.
Listen to the curve of the hills, the guttering voice.
The way to anywhere leads through humiliation.
There are only animal trails.”
― Tim Lilburn, Moosewood Sandhills

“Dry snow coming down in the hills.
Magpies hair-triggered and thuggish in worn trees.
A wall has started to fall in you, it will take years to land.”
― Tim Lilburn, Moosewood Sandhills

“We were dreamed around.
I got to know the intimate fold
Of feathers in the wing
And recognize and nod to the ripple in its rush.”
― Tim Lilburn, Assiniboia

“The names expose the namer more than they limn what's caught the eye.”
― Tim Lilburn, Living in the World as if it Were Home

“At best the chaotic river, alive in the senses briefly, is discountable, has no standing in definition; before the severity of Cartesian doubt, it does not exist”
― Tim Lilburn, Living in the World as if it Were Home