Joseph Fasano

“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