Sarah Koz

“Were they taken apart like this? But they seemed to be able to function after, though I couldn’t imagine how we would. We clung to each other. After a while I started to cry. Annalise held me.

“‘In the book,’ she said, ‘they say that after fucking one is omnivorously sad.’

“‘It’s not that.’

“‘What then?’

“‘It’s so easy for you.’

“‘Easy?’ She looked at me and her grin slipped off, right off into nowhere. ‘Easy? We could die of this. Don’t you feel it? Right now, we could be dying of each other. How do you think that feels, when I could be thrown out like garbage any day? And you, you are the heir to everything.’

“She had never talked about it before. Now I was so far into my own fear that it took me time to realize they were the same fears. We lay in silence, holding each other tight, until I caught up to it and passed ahead.

“‘How can she hurt them?’ I said finally. ‘What if…?’

“‘You are not her,’ said Annalise, which she had said before, but now, she took my shoulders fiercely and held me so she could look into my face. ‘You are not hers,’ she said. The difference was immense, and she struck my fear away easily. I was washed with gratitude, relief. ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘You never cry.’

“‘I never knew stuff before,’ I said. ‘How this changes everything. How it’s full of fear. In the books I read, it’s full of joy. In the books you read, it shows you how to put your hands into me and pull my heart out.’

“‘Poor princess,’ she said. ‘And what have you done with mine heart? You have eaten it all up.’

“After that we were shy and had to start to make stupid jokes, though I could not imagine ever seeing the light of day again, I felt so different.”
― Candas Jane Dorsey, Black Wine

“Would it be death? If so, she did not fear it, for she knew that her life would flow down the silver thread which always trailed her, to the Carrier of Spirits who would gather the rest of her in that vast sea of memory. Would she find her mother? She had found her mother. Would she go home? Where was home, anyway?

“The trees were full of fireflies, and suddenly, as if a new goddess came to meet her, the moon, a vast-seeming golden sphere of light, softened at the edges by the thickness of the air, rose and came toward her. She ran in her own globe of golden radiance until she felt that like Skaalya in the legend she could learn to fly. She would fly up, she would dive into the Moon, she would know what this goddess knew, she would give herself to the light which had at long last returned itself to her.

“She chased the moon toward her until they met at the doorway, the moon diving into the portal before Essa arrived. It was there, she knew, on the other side. Would she too pass through?

“She stood in wonder before the doorway: was this what ‘wondering’ truly meant? She could spend her life wondering.…

“Ahead of her was the bright doorway: green, iridescent, swirling, oval under the trees, lit from behind by the full moon.”
― Candas Jane Dorsey, Black Wine

“She was a being who needed joy. Having joy, she could triumph over the most desperate physical ills. But when joy flickered and went out, then she remembered the grave. Now, as she went softly over the bridge and began to climb the woods, joy seemed fled forever.

“She looked round her in a kind of terror, for she had come to the moment, which all sensitive people must reach at some time, when the soul perceives simultaneously the life of man—its small comforts, its upholstery of everyday—and the infinite; when it asks, bemused and anxious, ‘Which is the dream?’ They cannot both be true, it seems, for they are in flat contradiction. Yet daily life is true. There it is, with its duties and meals and wordy meetings; with its sweetness of affectionate glances and homely jests. That is no dream. Yet, when the beloved is dead, the daily life shrinks and withers; the infinite presses in. There it is, with all its indifferent stars, fearfully real, utterly unknown. With this intrusion of the infinite there come all the strange instincts of the spirit that have no part in daily life. These also are no dream. So there the soul stands, browbeaten and stunned by antithesis, murmuring, ‘Which is true? Is anything true?”
― Mary Webb, The House in Dormer Forest

“Day Thirty-Four

Handsome hunting heron,
standing in the weir,
our lives are lived apart
yet our bodies are so near;
as you wade across the water
seeking fish to eat,
I cannot help but wonder:
do you ever get cold feet?

Serenely splendid heron,
staring into river,
the wind that blows your feathers
is causing me to shiver;
the setting sun is sinking,
the ducks are flying home,
I cannot help but wonder:
do you ever feel alone?”
― Jez Green, Wonderland: A Forty-Day Poetic Pandemic Diary