Joseph Fasano > Quotes

“If you deny your shadow it becomes your tyrant.”
― Joseph Fasano, The Swallows of Lunetto

“Now when I go out, the wind pulls me into the grave. I go out to part the hair of a child I left behind, and he pushes his face into my cuffs, to smell the wind. If I carry my father with me, it is the way a horse carries autumn in its mane. If I remember my brother, it is as if a buck had knelt down in a room I was in. I kneel, and the wind kneels down in me. What is it to have a history, a flock buried in the blindness of winter? Try crawling with two violins into the hallway of your father’s hearse. It is filled with sparrows. Sometimes I go to the field and the field is bare. There is the wind, which entrusts me; there is a woman walking with a pail of milk, a man who tilts his bread in the sun; there is the black heart of a mare in the milk—or is it the wind, the way it goes? I don’t know about the wind, about the way it goes. All I know is that sometimes someone will pick up the black violin of his childhood and start playing—that it sits there on his shoulder like a thin gray falcon asleep in its blinders, and that we carry each other this way because it is the way we would like to be carried: sometimes with mercy, sometimes without.”
― Joseph Fasano, Fugue for Other Hands

“If I carry my father with me, it is the way / a horse carries autumn in its mane.”
― Joseph Fasano, Fugue for Other Hands

“...I knew that forgiveness, too, was a fire, and you carried it in the small tinder of your own two hands, and if you did not fail it, you could illuminate the world.”
― Joseph Fasano, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing

“Do something with the wildness that confounds you.”
― Joseph Fasano, The Crossing

“We are only as immense
as what we surrender.”
― Joseph Fasano, The Crossing

“Your absence clambers out of me
from the crossing

like horses through the thorn
along some shore.”
― Joseph Fasano, The Crossing

“When a man has fury in his bones he can do wild things, some of them fiercer than what he is, and sometimes afterward he wakes to what he has done, and if the waking is graceful he can make it right with his atonement. But when a man has crossed past fury, silently and without his knowing, so that somewhere in the night he crosses over into the cold and shimmering country of indifference, the barren country where he looks up into the stars and knows only the cold fire of continuance, the pith of wintering in things, then he has come to a place where he himself is the wild thing that will undo him, and he is no more himself than the snow that will cover him in oblivion, and he blows through the land and his own bones like the snow itself, and wherever he drifts he is banished, and wherever he arrives he will never return, and wherever he travels, he is never there.”
― Joseph Fasano, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing

“When you love the dead in someone, you're merciless.”
― Joseph Fasano, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing

“We abandon the dead. We abandon them.”
― Joseph Fasano, Inheritance

“...you step / into your life / and the afterlife is over.”
― Joseph Fasano, The Crossing

“The ruins of the dance are the dance.”
― Joseph Fasano, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing

“We are cast off so we can be astonished. We are abandoned so we can be found.”
― Joseph Fasano, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing

“Why are people given what they can't be given?”
― Joseph Fasano, Inheritance